


whomsoever i shall kiss

by acroamatica



Category: Original Work
Genre: M/M, and a love letter to two people i should never meet, and if you know what this is you know what this is, but with a sly wink we're going to pretend i can't get sued, colezra, emotional h/c, film violence, if you know who this is you know who this is, minimally realistic film sets, people not knowing what the hell they want, rpf wearing original fiction's best hat, sex in a convertible, still i may as well tag it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-15
Updated: 2017-03-15
Packaged: 2018-10-05 16:02:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10311947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acroamatica/pseuds/acroamatica
Summary: This kid, Oliver thinks, is going to be a problem.Acting is a complicated business. Around Danny Bloomfield, it's doubly so. And Oliver Foley, despite being one of the greatest actors of his generation, isn't sure he's up to the challenge.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [imochan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/imochan/gifts), [brawlite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brawlite/gifts).



> "oh what the hell," i said.  
> "i'll just write a short fic," i said.  
> "get it out of my system," i said.
> 
> thank you to:  
> \- maggie, who asked for it - i hope it even vaguely resembles what you had in mind;  
> \- brawls, who kept me going - a day late, a buck short, but the happiest birthday to you;  
> \- the all-star squad who let me whine for two and a half months;  
> \- everyone who sent me pictures and songs and likes and good vibes, because i needed every last one;  
> \- the one who probably wants this, for inspiring it (go on and google yourself, babe, i'm not afraid); and the one who could probably use this, for plaguing my every waking moment until i gave it to him.
> 
> And while he yet spake, lo, Judas, one of the twelve, came, and with him a great multitude with swords and staves, from the chief priests and elders of the people. Now he that betrayed him gave them a sign, saying, Whomsoever I shall kiss, that same is he: hold him fast. And forthwith he came to Jesus, and said, Hail, master; and kissed him. And Jesus said unto him, Friend, wherefore art thou come? Then came they, and laid hands on Jesus, and took him. _Matthew 26:47-50 (KJV)_
> 
>   
> 

This kid, Oliver thinks, is going to be a problem.

Oliver has read the script, all of it, and he knows exactly what sort of a person Eli Snow needs to be. _ELI (22, starved, downcast and shabby)_ is all over this script, intertwined with Alton Blackthorn so inextricably that Oliver feels inclined to have opinions.

His opinion of Danny Bloomfield is so far extremely mixed. 

His hair is too long, and his clothes are more Big Sur than shabby, and his smile is much too sparkling to ever be called downcast. He is an elf, sharp-faced and sloe-eyed. He is much, much too beautiful.

Most of all, he is paying far too much attention to Oliver.

That in and of itself isn’t really new, he supposes. The great Oliver Foley should be used to attention, and he is; he’s used to people hanging on his jokes, used to them giggling a couple of notes too high when he plays with them a little. The braver ones will try to return his serve. Brian Eddings, on his left elbow, gets nervous - not what Oliver expected after the calibre of films he’s done, but he likes Brian and his sweet, soft humour. Sylvia and Ashley, the onscreen sisters, have hit it off. They’re giggling now, but in a week or two they’ll get brave enough to gang up on him, he knows it. Ben is solid and jovial, to Oliver’s right. No worries there. 

Danny, though. The kid is smiling like he thinks he has the measure of Oliver, like there’s a thousand comebacks on his tongue, each better than the last, just waiting for him to choose his moment, but he hasn’t spoken; and he hasn’t looked away from Oliver more than a handful of times since they started, as he waits with his thumb tucked into his script at the scene where he comes in rather than reading along. It’s as though he’s trying to memorise Oliver’s face, or read his mind through the slant of his eyebrows.

Danny doesn’t look starved. Danny looks _hungry_ , which is very, very different - hungry, and wide awake.

Oliver wants to ask him if he’d like to take a picture. But he is after all a professional, and Eli is meant to be obsessed with Alton in his own fumbling and unaware way. Perhaps it’s part of Danny’s preparation. 

Brian and Sylvia are bantering now, and he recognises the point where Athelstan is about to stumble into Eli, looking the other direction. 

“ _Oof_ ,” says Brian as Athelstan, over an exclamation from Sylvia as Ruby, “my goodness, I’m terribly sorry, wasn’t looking -”

Oliver jumps in. “Look, now,” Alton says, “you’ve tripped over this poor kid’s books, what a mess. Let me help you.”

And Danny opens his script, and opens his mouth, and _disappears_.

“Oh, no, sir, no,” Eli stammers, “don’t worry, the fault was mine, I chose my place poorly - are you all right, sir? Please don’t be angry -”

“Why should I be angry?” Stan shakes his head. “It’s certainly not your fault - here, here’s one of the books.”

Eli looks straight at Alton. “Please don’t be angry,” he repeats, tucking his chin down as though he expects a blow.

Oliver knows he’s looking at Danny. The long hair and the clothes, so wrong, so far from Eli’s threadbare Sunday best - none of it fits the character. But the body language is Eli’s, every line cringing back from Alton, terror and resignation in the boy’s eyes and the way his lower lip trembles as he breathes.

“Say, it’s Eli, isn’t it?” Ruby says, thick with false cheer. “It is. Alton, Stan, this is Eli Snow.”

“A pleasure,” Alton says, and he closes his hand over Eli’s and squeezes once, gently. 

Eli shivers, which is not in the script, and Oliver wonders if it’s Eli Snow or Danny Bloomfield whose nerves are misfiring.

“Eli Snow,” Alton says. “I’ll remember you, Eli Snow.”

\---

Oliver doesn’t really smoke anymore, but Alton’s been yelling across the table at a shaking, panicky Eli for the last ten minutes, and when Martin calls _scene, good, take ten_ and Danny pushes away from the table, instinct tells him to follow the kid outside.

Danny doesn’t have more than about thirty seconds’ lead, but he’s already got his cigarette lit when Oliver opens the door.

“Fresh air?” Oliver asks, the old joke, and Danny gives him the quarter-smile that it deserves and holds out his pack.

“I don’t smoke a lot,” Danny says, “but I kinda really wanted one after all that.”

Oliver takes the pack - they’re not his old brand, and moreover they’re awful, but Danny’s smile gets better and warmer when he pulls one out and leans into the flame from Danny’s lighter. It’s worth the way his eyes sting.

“So,” he says. “It’s a lot, that script. For you. Not much fun.”

Danny takes a drag, and nods, blowing the smoke out in a thin stream. “I don’t care, to be honest. If a project like this comes along, and I can’t reconcile myself to - to what, like, crying in public? Having a screaming breakdown on camera? Getting my face slapped?” He smirks. “Like I haven’t done _that_ before. In fact that’s pretty much my whole resumé. I’d be nuts to pass this up.”

Oliver leans on the wall and looks carefully at Danny. “So you’re not planning to hold anything against me for what I have to do to you.”

“Oliver, my man,” Danny says, the syllables round and slow and silky: “I promise I won’t hold anything against you. Unless you want me to, in which case, sky’s the limit.” And he brings the cigarette back up to his lips, pressing his fingers in like he’s keeping a secret.

From the way he smiles around the cigarette, he knows Oliver’s looking at his mouth.

Oliver supposes people must do that a lot. It’s a very pretty mouth, the best feature of a good set. In fact, it calls to mind Hemingway’s line about F. Scott Fitzgerald: _The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more._

It does worry him. Deeply and profoundly.

He shouldn’t be out here. He shouldn’t be smoking. He shouldn’t be looking at Danny Bloomfield’s mouth.

The cigarette is burning itself out between his fingers, untasted. He won’t taste it, no more than he’ll ask for anything from this kid. He doesn’t need it.

But when he crushes it out and goes inside, the smoke still lingers in the fabric of his shirt; and Danny looks at him, and smiles a secret, sly smile, just for Oliver and nobody else.

\---

It is two months before he sees Danny again. It’s his first day on set, and Danny’s second or third; Danny meets him at the studio gate, bouncing excitedly on his toes until Oliver gives in and hugs him.

Danny is a pleasure to hug, and Oliver has to admit it. All his many angles are softened by the thick coat he wears and the way he leans in, chest to chest, tight and genuine, nowhere he’d rather be. His hair is longer now - he hasn’t cut it since the table read, and it brushes against the back of Oliver’s hand as he pats Danny’s back and feels him sigh happily.

“Everything’s amazing,” he says, with his chin on Oliver’s shoulder. “I can’t believe it’s _real_.”

“Oh, Danny,” Oliver deadpans. “I’m so sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, but - it’s a film.”

Danny giggles. “I thought you were going to tell me I’m dreaming. It _feels_ like a dream. I’m here, I’m making this movie based on this book I love, Oliver Foley is hugging me…”

“Oliver Foley has a costume fitting in twenty minutes,” Oliver says. He refuses to feel reluctance at letting go of Danny, no matter how nice he is to hug. “I’m early, but there ought to be an assistant along shortly to find me. Unless you’re here to show me where I’m going?”

“Your dressing room isn’t too far from mine,” Danny says. “And yeah, I know where everything is already - but I’m not meeting you in, like, an official capacity. You should check in and all that. I just…” He smiles at Oliver, sideways and a little shy, from underneath his hair. “I know this sounds crazy, but I needed to see you. I’ve been rehearsing for a couple of days now, and it was - it was weird. Something was missing. I feel like... I can’t be Eli without Alton. Eli barely even exists without Alton. And now it feels right.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear your world is spinning as it should,” Oliver says, and he is glad - Danny is radiating this cautious happiness, as though he’s pulled a shade down over its full brightness so as not to blind Oliver. It is strangely warming. “How’s your costume? Have they actually put you in it yet?”

“I’m going in with you, actually.” Danny grins. “Second fitting for me so you get to see exactly how dire Eli’s personal style is. I don’t think a single thing he wears is the right size.”

 _Downcast and shabby,_ Oliver thinks. This should be interesting.

It turns out that _dire_ is an equally apt descriptor; they have long slim Danny up on a box, yanking on his cuffs until they sit just exactly one inch too high, showing off plain white socks. Oliver can’t help thinking of the way his son looks, wiggling into Halloween costumes, flaunting his cheap nylon spacesuit onesies and saggy spandex supersuits as though they held all the magic of the real thing. The clothes the costume team are tugging into shape around Danny are better fabric, but they fit just as badly, too large where they should be small and too short where they should be long. With his hair up in a sloppy, messy bun, the effect is impossibly uneven and awkward. But Danny looks like he could just about burst into song.

“He’s real, he’s real, he’s real,” Danny chants, “ _look_ at him -”

Eli isn’t quite real for Oliver yet, not with Danny so full of puppyish glee that his spirit squelches whatever traces of Eli he’s internalised. Still, Oliver’s seen a few of Danny’s other films, now, mostly by accident, and he knows it’s possible for Danny to look less like a street urchin. Hair and makeup must surely have plans that will transform him. 

\---

He is right, but not quite how he imagines.

Oliver is with the makeup team, admiring the new silver at his temples and the subtle shaping of his eyebrows - he looks good, he thinks, a little older but slimmer and squarer and more distinguished than plain old Olly - when he hears the howling from hair. 

“ _No, no_ , no no no, _please_ no. You _wouldn’t_. You _didn’t_. Oh _God_ , what have you _done_ , what have you _done_? _Why_ , why do you hate me? _Aaaaaaah -_ ”

It only takes him a minute to recognise the voice raised in such lamentation - it’s Danny. Oliver thinks he’s laughing, mostly, that he’s playing it up, but there’s an edge of actual horror.

When makeup has enough headshots and they let him go, he wanders over to hair, following the wailing of the damned. And damned Danny most certainly is. 

“Oh,” says Oliver, and for a minute that’s all he can find to say.

The long hair is gone. Danny’s thick, shiny mane has been reduced to a cap sitting well clear of his ears and eyebrows, and clippered under that to the nape of his neck. Intrinsically it could have been salvaged - it’s the same haircut every teenage boy had in 1997 - but it’s too short and too square and looks like someone’s done it with safety scissors.

Danny is actually wiping at his eyes, whether it’s from laughing or not - it’s a fine edge.

“Fuck you,” he says to the hairstylist, who is buzzing the last wisps off the back of his neck. “Sincerely, though, fuck you.” He gestures to Oliver. “Look at _him_ , why does he get to look like - like that and I have to look like that kid in fourth grade whose mother cut his hair?”

“Because the script says you are that kid,” the hairstylist says calmly, clearly immune to Danny’s histrionics already.

“Don’t look at me, I’m hideous,” Danny says mournfully, holding his hands up to block - well, nothing, because with the mirror Oliver has all of the angles.

“There,” the hairstylist says, and steps back. Danny drops his hands and tries to take in what has happened to him.

“It’s not so bad,” Oliver tries. It is - but it isn’t, because Danny is twenty-three, and has a jawline sharp enough to sink an ocean liner, and his eyelashes are wet spikes and Oliver wants - something. He doesn’t know what. All he knows is that like this, Danny tugs at him in a way he didn’t before.

He’s been looking too long. Danny is looking back, and has seen him.

He expects a smirk, a joke, a corner of that bitten-red mouth turned up. But Danny looks at him like Eli looks at Alton - like he needs Oliver, needs his approval but expects and deserves his derision, and Oliver says, “Really it’s - okay, it’s awful, but you’re still pretty, aren’t you?”

“I’ve read the script,” Danny says. “Not even my mother can love a face like this.”

He doesn’t know why he does it. It just feels right to slip into Alton for a second: “You’re very important, Eli. Very important to me.”

The smile he gets in return is not one he thinks Eli knows. No, that’s all Danny, warm and genuine and just a little - thrilled.

“Thank you, Oliver,” he says, as though he is accepting something princely. And Oliver smiles back, because this will be fine, he can give Danny this much. 

It is not until much later that Oliver wonders if perhaps he has misjudged his own tolerance for the situation.

The problem isn’t Danny, exactly. It’s Eli. Now that they’ve made a misfit toy of elfin Danny, there’s nothing to break the illusion, and it’s clear to Oliver that he should never, ever try to go into casting. 

Danny wasn’t miscast at all. They begin their rehearsals and he sinks into Eli, hunches and slumps; slim becomes skinny, lean becomes gawky. His eyes are empty, nothing to see anyway but his scuffed shoes and the unending, grinding misery of his walled-in life. It’s like watching a candle flame go out.

Part of Oliver, the part that has been acting for twenty years, is very aware that there is a difference between the fiction of Eli and the truth of Danny. But the other part of Oliver, that knows perfectly well why somehow he always seems to notch up a new film every year or two where he’s playing a depressive alcoholic, doesn’t like it. Not one bit.

Still, they are both acting, and underneath all of this misery, he has to believe Danny is fine. And it is Oliver’s job, as Alton, to follow his worst instincts - the dark, manipulative core of Alton that doesn’t care about anyone but himself or anything beyond success - and sugarcoat them with his own instincts, so that Eli doesn’t notice how steely the hand is that is steering him, under its velvet glove.

People tell Oliver he’s preternaturally charming. He thinks they’re playing that up, to be honest. Nobody who regularly trips over themselves as much as he does should ever be called charming. But it seems clear that even if he doesn’t know exactly how he’s doing it, people around him go soft, malleable, amenable to whatever he might suggest just so long as they can do it with him. So today, he thinks, as he faces Danny down, he’ll listen to both sides.

“Action,” Martin murmurs, and Oliver starts forward, stalking slowly like a cat, with just the tiniest amount of sway in his hips. 

Eli stares at them from under his eyelashes.

“Eli,” Alton says, by way of greeting. “What have you learned for me?”

Eli swallows. “By the grace of God -”

“Ah, ah,” Alton cautions. One fingertip on Eli’s chest over his heart - tap, tap, and then rest it there. Eli stares down at it. “None of that God business with me, I told you. This isn’t about what God has done for you, my boy. This is about what I will do for you.” Tap, again, on the ridge of his collarbone. “And by extension.” Stroke his neck, above the collar of his shirt. “What you can do for me.”

Eli shivers. “Mister Blackthorn, I - I have a few names. Places to start.” He looks up at Alton, eyes wet, terrified that it won’t be enough. 

Alton’s instincts are telling him, of course, that Eli is ripe for the picking - that everything he needs the boy to do can be paid for with just a little counterfeit affection. “Good,” he says, and puts real warmth into it, the way Oliver would. “That’s very good, Eli. You’ve done well. Now follow them up. _Find_ them. For _me_.”

Eli gives a convulsive little nod, tries to say “Yes,” but only squeaks. _Well done,_ Oliver thinks. That’s much more evocative than if he could actually speak.

And the script says Alton hugs him, which feels right. But it’s Oliver who decides how: who pulls Eli in, slips his hands into the short, too-short hair; who pulls Eli in and down to his shoulder, and into his arms as though he belongs there; and it’s Oliver who presses his own cheekbone against the top of Eli’s skull, because it is Oliver who knows how to love.

And so it is Oliver, with too thin a veneer of Alton, who feels Eli trembling, his fists pressed between them as if they were the only barrier left - and feels the way his body gives in, all at once, to what it needs. He sags past his point of balance to lean heavily into Oliver’s chest. Reflexively, Oliver’s arms tighten around him to keep him from falling. That’s okay. He doesn’t think Alton would drop the boy, not today.

The release of tension shocks a sob out of Eli, a noise he can’t help.

“There’s a boy,” Alton says, and he - he needs to let Eli go, he has to, Alton wouldn’t want to hold him any longer than this. Gently, maybe too gently, he separates them. Martin will probably make them redo this. He should care. But this is a rehearsal, and that’s a tear sliding down the side of Eli’s nose.

He cups Eli’s jaw, and stares at his wet lashes. “Now,” he says, the words from the script he was looking at ten minutes ago dimly floating back to him. “You know what I need you to do. And I know you can do it. You can do _anything_ , Eli.”

When he slides his fingers down and off Eli’s face, Eli’s chin follows his hand for half a second, leaning into the touch as if he cannot bear it to stop.

Oh, that hurts - Oliver has swiped his fingertips through a tear track and they are damp as he clenches his fist and strides away - ten steps, and he should be out of frame - they’ll pull in tight on Eli, and -

“Scene,” Martin announces, and Oliver spins on his heel and heads straight back.

The boy standing alone in the middle of the set, with his head tipped back to let his sinuses drain, has Eli’s face, tight with the effort of stopping the tears. But when he looks back down, it’s Danny’s eyes that meet Oliver’s, even if they are wet.

“Sorry,” Danny says thickly, “sorry. I don’t know what happened there. Got caught up in the moment.”

“That was _great_ ,” Martin says, “are you kidding me? Bottle that, Danny.”

Danny’s weak smile is tugged askew as his breath catches again, the re-lit flame gutters, and it is entirely bad enough when it’s Eli crying but if it’s _Danny_ … there’s a too-familiar fishhook in Oliver’s chest, sunk in behind his breastbone where he’ll never be able to get it out. _Don’t just stand there_ , his instincts whisper, _don’t just let him stand there - don’t just let him cry - help him._

_He’ll let you._

He steps in and reaches for Danny, grabs his shoulder - and Danny throws his arms around Oliver’s waist in an awkward sort of tackle and _clings_ , and pillows his head on Oliver’s shoulder as if Oliver is all he’s got.

Oh. Okay. _Let_ might not have been a strong enough verb.

“Hey, now,” Oliver says, hoping he sounds more comforting than alarmed. “All right. You’re okay.”

“Don’t spoil him,” Martin laughs, and against his shoulder, Danny laughs too - rather wetly.

“Don’t _spoil_ him,” Oliver repeats. “You did just see him jump me, did you not?” He softens the statement by patting gently at Danny’s shoulders.

Danny squeezes Oliver for a moment, both arms tight on Oliver’s ribcage, and turns his head so he can press the bridge of his nose against Oliver’s neck.

“I’m okay,” he says. “I mean. You don’t have to stop. Ever. But I’m okay.”

Oliver has definitely made a mistake. At least one. Possibly several. But they’re here now, and Oliver Foley is a man who _commits_ to his mistakes. 

He knows he should let go. He knows he should, but - Danny hasn’t, and this feels good, and he doesn’t want to be Alton Blackthorn right now. There has to be a middle ground between cold and unfeeling, and encouraging something he can’t go through with.

“Are you sure?” he says.

“Heh,” Danny says, sounding more like himself now. “If I say no does that mean you’ll keep hugging me?” A flicker of a chuckle. “Ooh, will you hug me every time I cry? Because I won’t lie, I cry really easily, and I would _milk_ that arrangement.”

Oliver snorts, and pats Danny again. “I’d rather just hear you say yes.”

“Okay,” Danny says reluctantly, and lifts his head away from Oliver’s shoulder.

Oliver lets him do it - he does look better - and lets him step back and straighten his clothes while Martin grins at them both.

“How’s he ever going to pretend he’s touch-starved if you’re all over him?” the director asks Oliver. As though this, any of it, is _his_ fault.

Danny puts one eyebrow up, stares straight at Oliver, and says, far too smoothly for someone his age, “Oh, you have no idea how hungry I can be.”

Martin laughs uproariously. Part of Oliver wants to laugh too. It’s exactly the kind of joke he’d make, and he’s glad to hear Danny playing with him again. 

And yet.

The thought will not be displaced: Danny might not mean that to be as objectively ridiculous as it sounds. In which case…

Oliver wonders suddenly if he might be being seduced.

Danny is still smirking at him, despite his faintly puffy eyes. It’s a look that invites a response, and is hoping the response might be to have that look kissed right off his face.

That is not, Oliver tells himself very firmly, a thing he is going to do. That is not even a thing he is going to consider doing. It doesn’t matter what Danny means. That’s not a thing Oliver gets to want, not right now. Not, for fuck’s sake, in the middle of shooting a blockbuster family film. What a recipe for disaster.

Anyway, Danny can’t _really_ mean it like that. No. Oliver is projecting, and that’s deeply unhelpful. He gave the kid a hug, because he was having a hard time, and that was a nice thing to do, and now it is over. It can’t mean anything more than that.

He gives himself a shake. “Right,” he says. “On with the show.”

Slowly, Danny’s smile dims, and he looks away from Oliver, off to where the props crew are pasting down the edge of one of the posters on the wall.

 _THE WICKED IS SNARED IN THE WORK OF HIS OWN HANDS! REPENT, SINNERS, OR BE CONDEMNED_ , it says, in the blackest, boldest type.

 _I’m trying,_ Oliver thinks. _I’m trying._

\---

He’s started something. It seems like every time he runs into Danny now someone new has succumbed to his charms. Admittedly they are considerable, and just because Oliver has begun to get used to Eli’s tears and silences doesn’t mean anyone else has. 

Eli flinches from the sound of Sarah’s voice as Sue Ellen, but Danny adores her and leans into her to be petted and cuddled between takes. Tiny Kayla clings to one long leg and laughs as Danny hobbles, laughs until the rafters of the empty hall ring and Danny can’t help joining in. Ashley leaves pink lipstick marks on his temples; Sylvia just talks to him, shoulder to shoulder, their dark heads together like they’re fixing all the world’s problems one by one.

Oliver watches. He watches Stan’s nervous tics melt into Brian’s nervous tics, which then melt away, with Danny’s head on his shoulder; the sweet cheek kiss Danny offers as thanks is shyly returned in kind.

He has harbours everywhere now, as shooting progresses and Eli gets worse and worse, twitchier and twitchier, and Alton gets tenser and scarier and less sympathetic. He doesn’t have to come to Oliver to recharge himself after Oliver’s just spent the day being Alton, who is frankly an awful person and not the least bit comforting to anyone with more options than Eli.

It’s not that he’s any less… less playful, less eager, less touch-hungry, less _Danny_ with Oliver, when he is with Oliver. They still joke between takes, and Danny leans in and lands little feathery touches on his forearms when he talks. But then Danny says something light like “Well, I shouldn’t monopolise you,” or “I’m sure you need a minute or two to yourself,” the kind of thing you say at shitty parties when you can’t stand whoever you’re talking to for one more second. And two minutes later he’s snuggling up to someone else.

Oliver gets it. He wouldn’t want to hug him either. Alton and Eli are getting easier to step into, but harder and harder to shake off; he’s seen it in Danny’s face and in the set of his shoulders, a tightness and a pain that even the love of the entire cast and half the crew can’t quite seem to relieve.

He hates it, what Eli is doing to Danny. 

He hates it a _lot_ , because he can’t fix it now, if he ever could have. It’s too much his own fault. Alton bandages Eli up, holds him just long enough to give him the impetus to go on, but it’s all broken under the surface and laced with poison that’s seeping through into Danny’s own muscles. So Danny hasn’t asked for Oliver’s help.

And even if he did, Oliver… shouldn’t. Danny’s not for him. Danny is for better, sweeter, younger people: the people he’s finding instead of Oliver. 

Danny Bloomfield would be much better off if he stayed away from Oliver. And maybe Danny doesn’t know that, but Oliver does, when he can remember it past the clench in his chest that makes him wish things were different.

They aren’t different. They are this, and Oliver has made too many mistakes already not to know this one when he sees it.

\---

On Tuesday Eli kills Sue Ellen. A fit of rage, tempestuous screaming from both sides, and Eli snaps; then a fall, and a cloud of dust rising; a blur of motion and a sudden, total stop. 

She lies on the floor with her eyes open and Eli mutters Psalm 22 over and over as he kneels on the mezzanine and looks down, not at her, but at the cross on the wall.

_My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?_

_O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent._

And the hall echoes back his breath, and only that, as he starts to sob.

\---

When it’s over, Danny leads the applause for Sarah’s last take and hugs her as though she were his own mother, blotting his eyes against the shoulder of her cardigan. There’s a farewell dinner that night, of course. Danny spends the night sandwiched between Sarah and Sylvia, and Oliver stays in the back corner with Ashley and Ben and doesn’t interrupt. He’s having a good time. He is. Why should he barge in where he hasn’t been asked?

He wishes he still smoked, on nights like this - misses the convenient excuse to disappear out to a balcony, or a courtyard, or even just a doorway, whatever tiny sanctuary he could find, for five or ten minutes when it’s just too much to go on with. Eventually he misses it so much that he decides, to hell with the social fiction: “I’m going to get some air,” he says, and pushes his chair back.

There’s a little fenced-off area, open to the street, and he tucks himself into the darkest corner where he can watch the people on the sidewalk but none of them will notice him. He doesn’t want them to.

Tomorrow Eli falls into his arms. Tomorrow Alton gets his last chance to be a good person, and knows it’s already too late. Tomorrow -

Tomorrow he and Danny will detonate the emotional time bomb at the heart of the film. Just the two of them, no backup and no distractions. Just Eli, half an inch from everything he wants and doesn’t yet know he’ll never have. He will break, and let the pieces of himself crumble into Alton’s hands, trusting that Alton can save him.

Alton _can_ save him.

Alton was never _going_ to save him.

Oliver wishes -

The door opens, spills out light and warm air and laughter and Bowie. 

\- _and if you say run, I’ll run with you_ -

“Oliver?”

Instinctively, he leans further into the shadows.

“Oliverrrr,” Danny sings, “Olly, Olly, oxen free - come out, come out, wherever you are.”

He’s drunk. Not very. Some. Oliver saw a few frosty pink things land in front of him over the course of the night, and it’s enough to take the edges off Danny’s consonants. 

Danny sways over to him, leans in with his hands on the table, and then thinks better of it and drops into the chair opposite Oliver.

“Why’re you hiding out here?” He tilts his head slightly to the side, like a curious bird.

“I’m not hiding,” Oliver says.

“That’s not what I asked,” Danny says, with an accusing index finger wavering vaguely at Oliver’s face. “I didn’t _ask_ if you were hiding. You _are_ hiding. And you don’t want to tell me why.” He blinks at Oliver a couple of times. “Which means. Which means it’s _me_.”

Oliver winces a little. “It’s not you.”

“No, it is.” Danny is very matter-of-fact about this for someone with that much rum under his skin. “What did I do?”

“You didn’t do anything,” Oliver sighs.

Danny stands, and comes around the table, leaning his hip against it for stability. “Is this about tomorrow’s scene?”

“Maybe,” Oliver allows. “I don’t… I don’t really want to be Alton tomorrow.”

The smile Danny gives him is rueful and more gentle, more understanding, than he expected from the boy. “I know.” He slides along the edge of the table until his knees are almost between Oliver’s. 

“Danny,” Oliver says. He sounds exhausted, even to himself. “What are you doing?”

“I’m not doing anything,” Danny says slowly. “Just coming over here where I can be close to you. So you’re not alone. Because if I was sad, or worried, and alone -” He reaches out for Oliver’s shoulder. “You’d save me -”

Oliver flinches back from the echo of his own thoughts, and suddenly the reach is too far, and before he even has time to yelp Danny’s overbalanced and tripped himself, all elbows and shoulders, into Oliver’s lap. Oliver’s arms go around him, reflexively.

Everything is Danny, everything - he’s closed his eyes and all there is is the undefined sweet-spice of something, some body wash on Danny’s skin, the scent trapped in the cotton of his shirt. Danny’s arms are around his neck and Oliver’s ear is pressed right up against the too-fast thud of Danny’s heart.

He’s so warm. He’s so _warm_.

He feels Danny’s laugh before he hears it. “You _did_ save me,” he says giddily, “oh, Oliver - let me -”

\- he can’t, he can’t, Danny’s cradling his head and the point of his nose is in Oliver’s hair and he’s _drunk_ and Oliver has to _do something_.

“And now I’m saving you from yourself,” he says, and stands up, tipping Danny off him and onto his feet like a strange and ungainly dance lift.

Danny clings. “No,” he whispers urgently. “Come on - don’t you want this? Even a little bit? Can’t we -”

Oliver takes a very deep breath and grits his teeth. “You’re drunk. It doesn’t matter what I want. Not right now.”

“Are you sure?” 

Danny’s hands are so hot on the back of his neck, and his eyes are so soft, and Oliver hasn’t gotten laid in so long he can’t think about it or he’ll make a mistake he can’t fix.

He takes Danny’s forearms and lifts his hands away. “I’m sure.”

He’s so glad he’s an actor.

\---

Maybe it’s the way he’s holding Danny steady by the backs of the upper arms. Maybe it’s that Danny looks wistful, or that Oliver looks stressed, or that it really is getting late. Either way, when Oliver takes Danny back inside and starts making polite noises about heading back to the hotel, Ben nods immediately and agrees.

And Oliver’s so grateful for Ben, so grateful for his easy and terrible jokes that make Danny laugh and parrot back the punchlines for half a block - so grateful for his stability when Danny’s energy wears off all at once and he yawns and wavers and leans into Oliver, and without asking Ben takes his other arm.

Like that, they manage to walk the six blocks or so to the hotel they’re at.

“What’s your room number, Danny?” Ben asks. He’s extracted Danny’s keycard from his wallet, when Danny’s fingers were too uncoordinated to do it, but there’s no little sleeve with it.

“I’m in 514,” Danny says drowsily.

“I’m on 6,” Ben says. “Oliver?”

The loaded look says that what Ben really wants to know is, is anyone taking Danny to his room, to make sure he gets in safe, and if so, does Oliver want help. Oliver shakes his head minutely. “I’m on 9,” he says. “We’ll be all right, won’t we.”

“I won’t make any trouble, officer,” Danny says. This much Oliver believes, because he really does look as though he will fall asleep at any moment.

He only stumbles once in the hallway, and catches himself without reaching for Oliver’s hand. That’s a good sign. If there’s one thing Oliver knows, it’s degrees of drunkenness, and Danny’s young and strong of liver.

“You’ll pull up fine in the morning,” Oliver says, “if you just have some water before you fall asleep. Think you can manage that?”

“Of course I can.” They are at 514, and Danny stops, leans back against the doorframe and looks at Oliver. “I’m not a child, you know.”

“I just want to make sure you’re all right.” Oliver snags the keycard from Danny’s unresisting fingers and gets the door open. “You’re important, you know that.”

Danny’s looking at him, steady and solid despite the droop of his eyelids, and smiling just a little.

“Well, go on, into bed, then,” Oliver says encouragingly.

“You could stay,” Danny says, low like he’s telling a secret.

He licks his lips - a quick flash of pink tongue that leaves them parted and inviting.

Oliver looks past him, and into the room. It’s half the size of the one they gave _him_ , because he’s Oliver Foley, and it boasts a terrific view of the building across the street, and - it’s not a bad room, for a young actor just getting started, but. Oliver doesn’t belong in it, because Oliver doesn’t belong in Danny’s bed wherever it might be. Especially not the night before the day when he has to break Danny’s heart, on camera, not just once but over and over until Martin is satisfied.

“I can’t,” he says. “I really can’t.”

And something happens to Danny’s face then that makes Oliver wonder if all he’s done is get a head start on the heartbreak.

“Fine,” Danny says. His voice is very hoarse.

He can’t look at Danny anymore.

It’s the right choice. It has to be.

“Goodnight,” he says, to the middle distance, and starts back to the lifts.

Behind him, a door closes, and he doesn’t look back, and he doesn’t stop.

\---

The hall is dark, even with the moonlight. Alton could almost miss the shivering heap in the back corner. But the sobs give Eli away, exhausted and low though they are. He sounds as though he’s been crying for a long time.

He sounds as though it _hurts_.

Once he gets close enough to Eli to see him properly, it’s clear that he has, and it does. No gentle, photogenic glycerine tears these: no, Eli is a _mess_. 

His sleeves are damp, soaked through in places, where he’s wiped his face with them. That’s made no difference to the state of him apart from spreading things around a bit. When Alton kneels next to him and lays a careful palm against his forehead, he is chilly with shock and sweating enough to stick his awful fringe to his skin.

For a moment, he doesn’t seem to realise he’s being touched at all, much less by whom. And then he blinks his eyes clear for a scant second, two tears racing down his cheeks and off the point of his chin, and he sees that it’s Alton there with him. 

He freezes. 

“Hey, hey,” Alton says, and wraps his other hand around the back of Eli’s neck. “It’s me. I’m here now. What happened? Did you see?”

It’s a stupid question. He stepped over something on the way to Eli and he _knows_ what it was. Knows _who_ it was, and therefore, exactly what happened. But Eli has to tell him the most important part.

Eli’s eyes roll back and he pitches forward into Alton’s arms, muffling a broken little wail against Alton’s coat.

Alton sighs. All of this is collateral damage - just fallout. If only telling the boy that would give him perspective, not break him further. But no. He must be kind. 

He is not made for kindness.

“Okay. Okay, Eli. I need you to breathe -” which he does in a shattering gasp that probably does more harm than good - “and I need you to tell me who did this.”

Pressed against Alton’s ribs, Eli shakes his head. _No. No._

“Eli.” Alton tries to sound reasonable. “Come on. I need you with me. Breathe.”

“You were sent,” Eli whispers, and chokes and scrubs at his face; “you were. God sent you - to me - in my time of n-need.”

“Maybe. Maybe He did. That’s better.” Alton cradles Eli close, rocks him slightly, doesn’t think about how damp his own shirt is now where Eli’s leaned his cheek. “That’s better, now.”

It’s not better. Eli is sobbing again, losing the tiny bit of control he’d gained, and his hands clutch at Alton’s shirt, and Alton doesn’t have _time_ for this. “Eli. Come back to me. I can’t help you if you can’t tell me what you saw.”

Eli isn’t listening. Alton _doesn’t have time_ , every minute between him and whoever he’s chasing is critical - this calls for the big guns. He’d meant to save this, but -

He manhandles Eli up off his shoulder and cups his wet cheeks between his palms, brushing another tear away with his thumb.

“Eli,” he says, as gently as he can, and kisses him on the crease right between his eyebrows. 

It’s a solid press of a kiss, as though Alton could push strength and stability into him this way, and it works: Eli’s eyes snap open, though they are slightly unfocused and drowned. He’s still shaking, badly, convulsively, but he’s there.

“I need you,” Alton repeats, with just enough of a pause that he sees Eli internalise that statement, “to tell me what happened.”

Eli swallows, and looks around him like he’s only just remembered where he is. “Where’s my sister,” he whispers, and a look of terror joins the rest of the pain on his face. “Where’s my sister?”

“She was here?” Alton drops his hands to Eli’s shoulders and shakes him a little. He’s losing him again, he’s losing him. “Stay with me. Faith was here? Did they take her?”

“She - oh, God help me, _God help me, help me_ , please, _please_ -” It’s a prayer, not a blasphemy; in his arms, Eli crumbles back into helpless tears.

This is useless. He _doesn’t have time_.

The crack of his open palm across Eli’s cheek is so loud it startles both of them. “God can’t help you,” Alton snarls. “And neither can I if you keep _carrying on._ ” 

The look in Eli’s eyes, the sheer incomprehension of what has just happened to him, is one of the worst things Oliver’s ever seen on anyone’s face. His world has just absolutely fallen in on him. And for half a distracted second, Oliver thinks _someday this kid is going to win an Oscar._

And then Alton curls his lip, and stands, dragging Eli up with him.

“Come on,” he says. “Get in the car. If I’m right, I know where they went.” He doesn’t really need Eli for that, but he might be a useful distraction depending on how badly he broke cover when they came for him. Maybe he can get that out of Eli on the way.

And so Alton - entirely on the wrong track, entirely committed to disaster, hauling a murderer by the wrist as though he were the disobedient child Alton believes him to be - exits stage right at a clip that leaves no doubt of the entrance he’ll make when he gets where he’s going.

The instant Martin calls “cut” Oliver drops Danny’s wrist.

He doesn’t… he doesn’t know what to do.

There’s a bench set up along one of the walls of the hall, and Danny stumbles towards it. Oliver trails along, feeling the sudden role reversal keenly.

Danny sits heavily, puts his face in his hands; his shoulders hitch.

“I’m sorry,” Oliver offers, rather ineffectively. “Are you okay, is there - anything I can do?”

There’s more dignity than he expected in Danny’s face when he looks up. “I’ve been crying for an hour,” he says quietly. He is still, a little bit. “I could use a fucking Kleenex. Or some water. Or a hug.”

Oliver nods. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see a production assistant approaching with tissues and a bottle, so that’s been anticipated; and so all that’s left for him to do - all he _can_ do, and so what he _must_ do, is to drop onto the bench beside Danny.

When he puts his arms around Danny’s shoulders and pulls him in tight, it feels familiar and unfamiliar, treacherous and inevitable. And Danny goes with it, slumps into him and sniffles quietly against his shoulder as he tries to even out his breathing, and Oliver doesn’t want this to feel as good as it does.

Danny looks up long enough to accept the water and the tissues from the assistant with a weary-sweet “Thank you,” and then burrows back into Oliver’s arms as he sips at the water. Which, more than anything, makes Oliver feel… 

Forgiven, in a way he didn’t think he needed to be, but apparently... really did. Something in his chest is melting with the warmth of Danny’s breath.

God, Alton _is_ fucking getting to him.

He shifts Danny around, tugging at him until one of his legs is slung over Oliver’s knee and Danny’s too-pointy shoulder isn’t digging in so much. 

“So, I’m a dick,” he says.

Danny gives a spluttery, congested little laugh. “No, you’re not.”

“I am,” he insists. “I’m a total dick. Not because I hit you, that was in the script. And not because I turned you down last night, you were drunk. Because all this time -” He wants to press his cheek into Danny’s hair, and can’t think of a good enough reason not to do it before he’s done it. “I’ve been avoiding doing this. Which is nothing, it’s just a hug. And I think... we both needed it, and I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” Danny manages to extract a tissue from the packet without pulling all the rest with it, and blows his nose at some length. “Ugh. Sorry. I just.” He waves a hand as if swatting something away. “I’ll stop in a second.”

“I have kids,” Oliver points out. “You could wipe your nose on my sleeve and it wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened to me.”

“Costuming would kill me,” Danny says, but he’s smiling. “They probably already will. This shirt is gross.”

“Whoever sealed your makeup deserves an award, though.” Oliver runs a fingertip over Danny’s cheek to prove his point. “You held up well.”

“I warned them,” Danny says. “‘Go for the synchronised-swimming makeup today, Jenny.’ I know what I’m like. Eli wouldn’t cry pretty, and I knew I was gonna lose it as soon as I saw you.”

Oliver hums in acknowledgement. That’s a dangerous statement, depending on how he means it. But he’s not sure how to ask, or even if he should.

“You were brilliant,” he says eventually. That’s not up for debate. “You really were.”

Danny snorts. “Sure. And the Oscar for Most Covered In Snot goes to - Daniel Bloomfield!”

“Hey now,” Oliver cautions amusedly. “As a frequent contender in that category, haven’t I actually won awards for having a good howl onscreen for a couple of hours? Shouldn’t I know? People _love_ that. I’ve made a career out of it. That and my smouldering good looks.”

Martin’s hovering, fifteen feet away, with a question clear on his face. Of course they’ll have to get on with it. Time is money, and on a production this size it’s a very great deal of money. It’s amazing they’ve been left alone for even a few minutes.

But he pays careful attention to Danny’s breathing for a few seconds - yes, he’s all right now - before he nods at Martin.

“Okay,” Danny says, so he’s seen Martin too, and the oncoming army of techs and assistants and Jenny with her makeup bag. He unfolds himself from Oliver’s arms with surprising grace, and tips his chin like a diva: “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr DeMille,” he calls, archly, and Oliver chuckles along with everyone else.

Onscreen, nothing changes - that afternoon and evening they work until late, and Alton throws Eli to the wolves and gets nothing back but a chilling whisper of Matthew 26:48, _whomsoever I shall kiss, that same is he: hold him fast_ ; because Alton has kissed Eli and betrayed him all in the same moment and Eli _knows_ it’s his doom.

“ _Friend,_ ” he says to Alton, as they pin him over the hood of a car and his tears pool on the paintwork, “ _wherefore art thou come?_ ”

Alton knows he is Judas. He has always been Judas. It bothers him less than it should.

But after every difficult take, now, Danny comes to Oliver for a minute or two.

He fits so nicely into Oliver’s arms. He shouldn’t, but he does. Perhaps it’s a symptom of something, a deficiency in Oliver that leaves him craving Danny’s warmth like salt, or sugar, or nicotine - but it’s so easy and so satisfying to hold him now that he’s let himself do it.

He remembers why he tried so hard to stop. Of course he does. It just seems… less important now than keeping Danny in one piece. After all, it was always to protect him, wasn’t it? So now the protection is taking a different form. So what. It’s not compromising his principles.

That night everyone goes straight to their own beds without a murmur of protest, and Oliver sleeps like a rock and wakes with an armful of blanket, as if he’s been reaching out for someone in the night.

He’s slept alone for half a decade, he thinks, as he washes and dresses. But muscle memory is a funny thing, surfacing unbidden when it’s least expected. And his body feels different today, looser through his stretches than it has been in weeks - he doesn’t feel quite so much like Alton, desk-bound and aching, older than he should be, grasping and angry. Today there is, at the heart of him, something soft.

The energy on set is different too. Danny sidles in for a quick half-hug hello as they wait at the craft services tent for coffee, but it’s bustling with people, crew and extras, wrangling and being wrangled for the big showdown. The closest they will come to the intimacy of yesterday morning is the two minutes where Alton tries to talk Eli down, with twenty feet of actual distance between them and more than that in emotional distance. Eli isn’t listening anymore. Eli will never listen to Alton again.

It feels less tense, although technically it isn’t. Alton has already lost, and over the next few hours it plays out: he spends a lot of time yelling, and Danny does a lot of things that will look much cooler in post-production, and screams until he goes hoarse, and Oliver dodges the trajectories of the blanks in Eli’s gun until at last it is Brian and Sylvia’s turn to leap into danger, and Stan and Ruby scale the fire escape and take Eli down.

But they have not, of course, been quite fast enough.

It’s in the script, and it unfolds as it has been foreseen: the squib under Alton’s crisp white shirtsleeve pops like the shadow of the bullet it’s meant to represent, Eli’s last shot squeezed off blind before Stan wrestles the gun out of his hand. After Alton thought he was safe. And he staggers, and swears - he’s been winged, but not hit - and clutches grimly at his arm with his jaw set, and runs.

Ruby is shouting something. He can’t hear her. Her hand where it’s been pressed to Eli’s shoulder is red.

The cameras follow - he almost trips on the narrow staircase, but catches himself - and then he’s skidding onto his knees next to Stan, who has pulled Eli into his lap. There’s a spreading dark stain on Eli’s shirt, hidden in the black: one of the sniper shots they all thought had missed has found its target, and Danny bites into the gel capsule he’s had tucked in his cheek for twenty minutes to cough a fine mist of red onto Alton.

Eli opens his eyes. Alton leans in, close enough to hear anything he says. And Eli surges up from Stan’s lap, breaks a wrist out of Ruby’s hold and clamps it on the back of Alton’s neck, and kisses him hard on the mouth.

He tastes like corn syrup and mint and red dye, and it’s sticky and smeary and showy. He knows his own mouth will be stained with it.

Eli goes limp, then, falls back onto Stan, his face horribly slack and a drop of blood sliding down his chin - the extras in the green paramedic uniforms are there in a moment and they are pulling him away, and Oliver lets everything blur for Alton as Ruby moves him back and out of the way. Stan yells something about going with them as he scrambles to his feet. Ruby nods tightly. Alton looks at her. She looks back at him, and she’s so sad, she’s so sad, as she takes the handcuffs and snaps them around his wrists, her lips moving through the Miranda he knows by heart. 

When she finishes with “Do you understand?”, he is looking into her eyes, and he does understand. He does.

“ _Whomsoever I shall kiss,_ ” he murmurs tonelessly, his lips tacky with Eli’s blood, “ _that same is he: hold him fast._ ”

And then she shakes her head slowly, and pulls a tissue from her handbag, and gently wipes the blood off his mouth.

The camera holds on them, inches from her hands, for what feels like a very long time before Martin says “Cut.”

His knees hurt, and there’s fake blood dripping slimily down his arm. It itches.

“Oof,” he says, which seems like all there is to say.

Sylvia laughs, and slips the catch on his handcuffs so he can shake his arms out.

Safely off-camera, he sees Danny sit up and high-five the paramedic extras.

Okay. All right. Danny’s fine.

He turns away. He needs to get all this rigging off him. He needs - he needs to get the syrup out of his mouth, it’s cloying and bitter-edged with the dye, but he can’t just spit on the ground and he can’t quite work up enough saliva anyway, and why’s his heart going so fast all of a sudden?

There’s a hand on his clean shoulder. “Oliver.” It squeezes. “ _Olly_. Hey.”

Something cold is pressed to the back of his neck, and as if a switch has been flipped, he can take a breath, can focus on - Danny, wrapped in a silver space blanket, looking at Oliver with concern.

The cold thing is a water bottle. Danny pushes it into his hands. “Drink,” he says. He must have been given one too, as his teeth are no more than faintly pink now.

Up the road, well out of shot, there’s a rubbish bin. For a minute he thinks he’ll gag on the taste in his mouth, ever more metallic, but he swishes the water around and spits, and spits again, and he’ll be okay. He’ll be okay now.

The crinkling of the blanket tells him Danny’s behind him. “Should I be insulted?” Danny says mildly. “People don’t _normally_ need to wash their mouths out after they kiss me.”

“Yes, well.” Oliver spits again for good measure, and drinks. “You don’t normally tongue half a teaspoon of stage blood into their mouths, do you.”

“Oh, don’t boys like that?” Danny moves closer. His face is a perfect moue of disappointment. “Maybe that’s where I’ve been going wrong.”

This kid. What is he going to _do_ with him?

Danny smiles slowly. “I’ve washed my mouth out. You feel like a do-over?”

There’s a second where he has no idea what to say - no idea what he wants to say, even.

Then Danny grins. “Joking, I’m joking. I’ll brush my teeth first, at _least_.”

He extends one space-blanketed arm like a silver wing and wraps it around Oliver. “Come on. Hug me.”

That… is a good idea. The blanket keeps the stage blood away from Alton’s clothes, what few are still salvageable, and it’s strange how reassuring it is to feel Danny breathing against his neck, steady and solid and very alive and completely okay.

Oh, and _there’s_ his ability to feel his own emotions again. Okay. 

There certainly are a lot of them. So many they crowd against each other and get stuck in the door, leaving him mostly with _unsure_ , and something that might be a cousin to _scared_.

He wants to hold Danny tighter. He can let himself do that. Danny won’t mind.

“Mmm,” Danny says, and nestles in. “Yes. Like you mean it.”

He does mean it.

“So I was talking to Sylvia, earlier,” Danny says, and he’s trying to sound nonchalant but not doing it very well. “She was saying she and Brian went out with the second unit for that scene on the lookout point, you know? And they had to wait out the sunset before they could start shooting, and she said it was the most beautiful thing she’s ever stared at impatiently.”

“Hm,” Oliver says. “You’re going somewhere with this, I assume.”

Danny laughs. “It’s like you know me. Anyway. I have tomorrow off, and I thought I might borrow a car off someone, and around six, I might drive up there and, y’know, hang out with the majesty of nature for a couple of hours.” His fingers curl in the back of Alton’s shirt, then unclench. “So I was wondering. If you might have… some opinions on sunsets.” 

“I’m shooting in the morning,” Oliver says. “Maybe into the afternoon depending on how things go.”

“I know,” Danny says. “And you don’t have to say yes or no. You don’t know how tired you’ll be, you don’t want to commit to things, that’s fine. I get it. Just. Y’know. I’m going. You can come if you want. Or don’t.”

“I’ll take it under advisement.” Danny’s arms have loosened around him a little, and Oliver lets him go. “But it’s kind of you to offer.”

Danny shrugs. His smile is a little reserved, a little guarded, but it’s there. “No problem, dude.”

 _Dude_. As if he hasn’t just asked Oliver on a date.

Maybe he hasn’t. Maybe he’s just a very sweet, affectionate person, and drunk Danny doesn’t care who’s touching him as long as someone is (which drunk Olly certainly did more than enough of at his age); maybe he just makes sexual jokes because it’s funny and he doesn’t mean anything by it (which even sober Olly does more than enough of now); maybe all of this is nothing and he’d just like some company while he watches a sunset.

Suddenly Oliver is cold, in a way that he suspects has very little to do with the now-drying stage blood sticking his clothes to his skin.

\---

He spends most of the next day handcuffed to things, under extremely bright lights, while his friends say horrible things about him and make him admit that all of them are true. It’s exhausting, even when Brian can’t quite make the series of sounds in “similarly extenuating circumstances” come out the same way twice and melts into giggles that set Sylvia off.

It took twenty minutes and alcohol wipes last night to get the last few flecks of stage blood off his skin. The layer of makeup helped, but around his mouth the pink didn’t want to let go and he had to scrub until his skin felt tight and foreign, inexpertly shrinkwrapped onto his skull. Even now his face doesn’t feel like his own.

Luckily, Alton isn’t required to do very much beyond staring at a fixed point over the shoulder of whoever’s interrogating him now and looking as though he’s doing very difficult mathematics in his head and not liking the results.

He is, of course, but it’s the calculus of how he lost this game. How he’s lost Eli. He can’t stop thinking about the blood on Eli’s chin, too red, too bright.

Oliver can’t either, but he lets it inform his performance.

He won’t break.

He doesn’t break.

But then he _can’t_ break. They wrap for the day and he tries to push Alton away and take his own body back. He’s met with a gnawing unease, a sense that the locks won’t undo; he can’t settle.

He showers, the water up too hot and then too cold; neither works, and his skin still doesn’t fit right. He shadowboxes, but there are too many shadows. Nothing he has to eat looks appealing. Nothing he wears looks right. He looks in the mirror and his face isn’t Oliver. It’s not Alton, but he doesn’t know who it is.

He leaves his hair to air-dry, parks his sunnies on his head to keep it out of the way, throws on a henley and a jumper, jeans and boots, grabs his wallet and his keycard and is out the door before he’s thought too much about it. He needs…

He’s hunched into himself, arms crossed tightly over his chest, when the door to 514 opens.

He tries to smile. Oliver Foley is a legendary charmer. Surely he can bloody well act like it. 

“It’s quarter to six,” he says. “Is that offer still good?”

The way Danny’s eyes sparkle when he grins is, he thinks, the first good thing he’s seen all day.

\---

From somewhere, Danny has sourced a truly amazing car - it looks older than Oliver, and approximately the tonnage of an ocean liner. The front and rear bumpers look like what’s left of them is real chrome. It sounds like a tank and drives like a bus, and they put the top down.

Danny’s an okay driver. The transmission sticks, and Oliver can’t tell if it’s the age of the car or the youth of the driver, but either way Danny just laughs at the juddering starts and doesn’t miss a beat of the song on the radio that he’s singing along with. It’s one Oliver vaguely knows - _but it’s just the price I pay, destiny is calling me, open up my eager eyes_ \- but certainly not well enough to join him, even though he suspects Danny would like him to, from the way he keeps glancing over.

The wind blows their hair back, disarranging Danny’s bowl cut into something more normal, the suggestion of what it will look like in a month or so when he’s allowed to grow it out again. In the late afternoon low-slanted sunlight, the mathematics of Danny’s face are strange: he is all angles, sharp on every edge, but in the way that enough degrees of angle form a circle, the sum of his parts is somehow an impression of softness. 

He smiles at everything and nothing, at life, and Oliver can’t quite look away from him.

“Where’d this thing come from?” he yells, over the wind and the traffic noise.

“Hal, you know, the dolly grip in the second unit?” Oliver nods - he thinks he’s met the man half a dozen times, but of course Danny knows him well enough to convince him to lend Danny his car. “This is his weekend cruiser, he’s been working on it for a few years. Isn’t it the best?”

“It’s certainly something,” Oliver admits. The leather seat creaks under him as he shifts a little sideways. It feels like a set piece, like somebody should be alongside them in a second vehicle with a camera, someone else filming in the backseat - the adventures of Olly and Danny, out for a drive to someplace ridiculously scenic where a dramatic confrontation will happen.

He amuses himself by working out the script for it in his head as Danny drives. Neither of them has a motive to make it anything violent, and although Danny’s wiry underneath those clothes and at least four times as strong as he looks, Oliver’s still confident that if it came to it he could snap the boy in half. So it wouldn’t be an exciting fight, which means it can’t be a fight scene. So maybe it’s a big emotional blowout, then. Catharsis. One or both of them will have to cry. Probably both. Danny will pace, maybe throw a punch for Oliver to catch - some shouting, wild accusations, lots of swearing. Yes. And then he supposes either Danny jumps over the door of the convertible and drives away with the wheels squealing and spitting gravel, leaving Oliver screaming obscenities at the disappearing car, or -

“We’re here,” Danny says. And they are.

Oliver shakes himself out of his trance and looks out through the windshield.

“What were you thinking about?” Danny says. “It looked pretty engrossing.”

“Never mind,” Oliver says, and pushes his car door open so he can get out. “Doesn’t matter.”

There’s a break in the tree-line, here, a wide flat spot looking out over the city and the sky. Danny’s brought the car right into the centre of it, and Oliver walks out in front of it and up to the edge of the plateau, a couple of feet from the edge of the steep rocky drop.

He hears Danny come up behind him. “Hell of a view, hey?” Danny says softly.

“It’s fucking stunning,” Oliver agrees. “Ten out of ten, Bloomfield. Good work.”

“Wait ‘til you see it after dark.” Danny chuckles. “I knew Sylvia would come through. Now - let’s see if Hal did too.”

“What d’you mean?” Oliver follows Danny back to the car. “What more could you ask for than a loaner land yacht?”

Danny pulls the keys out of the ignition and goes round to pop the trunk. 

Suddenly something is flying at Oliver, a large soft squarish mass that hits him in the chest.

“A land yacht,” Danny says triumphantly, “with a picnic blanket.”

\---

“I have to hand it to you,” Oliver says, waving a hand full of sandwich at Danny. “This is much better than I expected.”

Danny grins back at him. “I wasn’t gonna drag you out here with no dinner and nowhere comfy to lie and watch the stars, dude. That would not have been cool of me. But I? I am extremely cool, and here you see the results. This is not my first rodeo.”

They are sitting on the hood of the convertible with the blanket between them and the metal. Danny’s pulled it up so he can recline against the windshield, lounging like the world is his fainting couch. Oliver doesn’t know how he can possibly make that look comfortable. Although it may have something to do with the pillows Danny has pulled out of the back seat, which are probably the ones off Danny’s bed. He’s got both of them under his shoulders right now, because Oliver decided that he didn’t want crumbs down the neck of his shirt and opted to eat sitting up, like an adult.

This is one of the longest cars Oliver thinks he’s ever seen. Even stretched out, his mile-long legs crossed at the ankle, Danny fits on the hood well enough that where Oliver sits with his boots propped on the bumper, he can tap a pointy toe against Oliver’s thigh.

“If you weren’t expecting to enjoy it,” Danny says, and gathers himself slowly up to slide closer to Oliver, “then why’d you come?”

Ah, the million-dollar question. 

There are about a hundred possible answers, too - everything from the flippant _I already bought everything off the Shopping Channel_ to the too-equivocal _it seemed like something to do_ to the cutesy _who doesn’t like a good sunset_ to the overdramatic _every other alternative kind of made me want to drink myself insensible_.

It surprises him a little that what falls out of his mouth is the truth:

“I really didn’t want to be alone tonight.”

Oliver knows how Danny is looking at him. He eats the rest of his sandwich in three bites to avoid having to say anything else just yet.

For a while, Danny is silent.

“Olly,” he says eventually, “are you okay?”

Oliver laughs and hopes it actually sounds like he means it. “I’m fine. Truly I am.”

“It’s just you and me and the majesty of nature. You can talk to me. I promise.” Danny scoots a little closer. “And it’s been a really long week. I’ve cried _so_ much. Believe me, I know what it feels like.”

He doesn’t. He’s not old enough to, not to know it with the same weight that Oliver knows it, and he hasn’t bled enough in his short life to realise how it feels to be scared the marrow at the heart of your bones can’t replenish what you’ve lost this time.

But bless him, he’s trying. Oliver puts out an arm and Danny ducks in under it to lean against him. “I know you do,” Oliver says. The acknowledgement is more important than the truth. 

The sky is pinkening at the horizon, gleaming bronze-perfect off a million panes of glass below them, and Danny slips an arm around Oliver’s waist.

“You don’t _have_ to talk,” he murmurs. “We can just… watch the sunset for awhile.”

Oliver knows he should stop Danny, knows he should put some distance between them. If he leaves this as it is, the big emotional blowout he’s scripted will turn tail on him and leave him with nothing but the romance scene he’s been avoiding so well up until now. But the longer they sit here, the harder it gets to remind himself that every part of this is still a bad idea, even if every alternative he can think of is worse. 

Hasn’t he earned a little love? Hasn’t he earned the warmth that Danny is transfusing into him? And hasn’t Danny earned a little trust, that he’ll stop if Oliver really wants him to?

He’s so hollow.

 _...Fuck it,_ he thinks, staring defiantly out at the sunset. _Just this once._

“It’s a beautiful sunset,” he says. It keeps him from saying something else.

“Yeah,” Danny says. “Yeah, it is.”

\---

They have twenty minutes, almost, of comfortable silence, and he can feel them both trying not to even think, in case a stray thought spoils the moment. 

So gradually that it might just be gravity, Danny nestles closer, until he’s pressed against Oliver from shoulder to knee, but his hand stays where he put it on the back of Oliver’s hip while the sky goes through its wild blaze of colour and settles into a thickening darkness.

“Stars’ll be out soon,” Oliver says. Danny’s heavy against his side. It’s hard to tell just exactly how much he’s awake.

“Mmm,” Danny says. “Let’s... lie back. It’ll be better that way.”

He thinks about refusing, for half a second, but that’s - _pointless_ , is what it is, it’s pointless, and anyway Danny has ducked back under his arm and is crawling inelegantly up to the pillows, so it’s not quite that kind of suggestion.

He flings the top pillow at Oliver and flops down onto the other with a happy little sigh. “Yaaas,” he says, drawing the vowel out to comical proportions. “The life.”

“You know, we could sit in the actual seats,” Oliver points out.

“No!” Danny says vehemently. “Stop that, you sound like. Like a _dad_ , which I know you _are_ , but not tonight. No. Tonight we are young and stupid, and we lie on the hood because it’s fucking great.” He flings his arms wide. “Get your head on that pillow, Oliver Foley, or so help me.”

“Now who sounds like a dad?” Oliver teases, but he lies down anyway.

“See?” Danny says.

For a blanket and one pillow on a fairly unyielding surface… it’s really not that bad. He’s definitely slept on worse.

“Fine,” Oliver says. “You win. D’you do this often, luring unsuspecting men out and making them lie on cars with you?”

Danny laughs. “First of all, you suspected plenty. But no. Usually it’s just me, maybe a few, uh, intoxicants if I’m staying the night - if I really need to get out of my head - and some music, and the stars.”

Oliver shifts the pillow under his shoulders. “So it’s a tradition, then?”

“A little bit.” Danny waves a foot at the first scattering of stars. “I like to do something to see off a character when I’m done with them. I mean, I don’t know if I’m done with Eli, there are going to be more books in the series, so I guess anything’s possible. But the thing is, I have to put him away or he’ll… he’ll linger. They all do. So I started doing this thing, where…” He pauses, collecting his thoughts. “Basically, they’re like ghosts. They haunt you because there’s something they want. So you have to find a way to give them what they want.”

“And this helps you with that?” It’s not the weirdest coping mechanism Oliver’s heard of, and it’s certainly healthier than some, but he doesn’t feel like he quite understands the practical application of it yet.

“I wait ‘til I feel like they’re listening - being outside in the dark is good for that - and I just… I tell them the rest of their story. Make something up with a happy ending, but one that feels right for them.” Danny spreads his hands out. “And then I can hold onto the idea that somewhere, somehow, they got what they needed.”

“Ah,” Oliver says. “So you thought you might rope me into this little exercise, did you?”

“If you don’t want to,” Danny says, “you don’t have to - we can just lie here. But I thought… you look like Alton doesn’t want to let you go, lately. So it might help you to do it too. If you want.”

Danny is so terribly earnest. And far too observant. 

Oliver sighs. “As lovely as that sounds, I’m not sure I’d like Alton to get what he wants.”

“Oh, no no.” Danny shakes his finger. “Not what he _wants_. No. What he _needs_ , though. Which - tell me what Alton needs, to end up in a good place.”

“I feel like it’s going to involve some jail time,” Oliver says wryly. “He loses his job. Goes home. You know, adopts a puppy, does his community service hours. He probably googlestalks Eli to see how his trial goes - of course Eli gets a plea deal, I’d assume, house arrest and probation. I don’t think he talks to Eli. I don’t think he’d dare. I don’t know. I just don’t see him being… terribly happy, no matter what he does. But he wasn’t happy before either.”

Danny rolls onto his side, facing Oliver. “No, he wasn’t. That’s the reason he’s so fucked up about getting power. He doesn’t have any love, and he reaches for power instead, and he loses all of it.”

Oliver laughs a little bitterly. “Well, that’s cheerful, isn’t it. Go on and tell me what Eli needs, then. Where’s his happy ending?”

It’s hard to see Danny in the dark, but his voice is very gentle. “I have a theory about that. He’s probably in the hospital for a while, under guard, while he heals up. That’ll do for most of his time served. What if he gets free, and he doesn’t know what to do because he’s got nothing, no friends and nowhere to go - and he goes to the park where he always used to meet Alton, and Ruby’s there - and she takes him home to Pearl, and Stan, and Joseph, and feeds him and lets him sleep on the couch. Ruby thinks this is great, of course, because he’s basically under her supervision the whole time so he’s going to meet his probation conditions no problem. And he’s in therapy with Pearl, by court order, so having her around is great for him. Joseph makes sure he eats. And he has this huge crush on Stan. I’m sure of it. So he’s in this big happy well-adjusted home for the first time in his life, with people who care about him and show him what real love is like.”

Oliver closes his eyes and envisions a sunny kitchen, and a warm living room, and laughter, and Eli with a blanket on his shoulders, smiling tentatively. The part of him that is still Alton snarls - rage, yes, and… jealousy.

Danny’s hand lands on his shoulder. “And then one day,” he says, “he’s out in the park, getting some fresh air, just chilling on a bench and soaking up a little sunshine - and this dog runs up and starts licking his hands, it’s a good dog, a nice dog, and he says to it ‘who do you belong to, sweetheart?’ And there’s this silence, and he looks up - ‘Me,’ says Alton.”

Oliver feels the kick of that revelation, and nods. Of course.

Danny rubs a little circle with his thumb. “I think maybe… they’re both deeply horrified, but Alton feels a little better that Eli’s alive and looking well, and Eli sees that Alton looks tired and sad and lonely, and the dog just wants to hang out with Eli forever so Alton sits with him for a couple of hours. Alton doesn’t try anything. Doesn’t even talk much.”

“He says he’s sorry,” Oliver says suddenly, as the story takes hold deep in his chest. “Before he leaves. He says he’s sorry. He’s been wanting to for… a long time. More and more, the farther away he gets from the mindset where he put his goals ahead of being... a decent person.”

He opens his eyes and shifts onto his side too. In the dark, Danny’s eyes are black pools, but there is enough moonlight to catch on his angles and reveal that he is… almost smiling. Almost.

“Eli thanks him,” Danny says. “And he says ‘maybe I’ll see you around.’ Alton just sort of…”

“Nods,” Oliver supplies. “Yeah. Like he doesn’t know, will he or won’t he. But the next Sunday, Eli’s back on the bench, and Alton comes back because - because he can’t stop thinking about Eli.”

“And it takes a few weeks,” Danny interjects, “for them to actually…”

“Get comfortable.”

“Yeah. Because, like, Ruby and Pearl don’t like it, they want him to stay away from Alton, but Eli knows he’s - he’s different now. He’s got no power, except what Eli gives him. And Eli has this moment where he sees that…” Danny bites his lip. “Their roles are reversed. And Alton is the one starving for what Eli has.”

He reaches out. The pads of his fingers are little spots of warmth underneath Oliver’s chin.

“He realises he forgives Alton,” Danny murmurs, “about three seconds before Alton does.”

And then Danny leans in, his eyelids fluttering shut, and Oliver is being kissed - with such gentleness, such delicate pressure that it’s over almost before he’s understood it’s happened. It’s only the way Danny’s thumb lingers at the corner of his mouth that makes him sure he didn’t imagine it.

 _No,_ he thinks, like a climber who’s just felt a foothold give.

“He probably shouldn’t forgive Alton,” Oliver says haltingly, a warning and a plea. “He probably shouldn’t.”

Danny strokes the corner of Oliver’s bottom lip. “Does Alton… want to be forgiven?”

There are too many levels going on in this conversation, but the answer on all of them is the same, and Oliver’s face flushes hot. “He doesn’t deserve it, Danny.”

Danny’s eyes go very, very soft. “ _For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you._ Matthew 6:14.” He pets Oliver’s chin. “I’m sorry, Olly. You get forgiven whether you like it or not.”

“Don’t, Danny -” Oliver says, and he doesn’t know why his voice wants to break so much, but it does and he swallows the rest of the sentence.

“Don’t, what?” Danny doesn’t pull back. “Don’t forgive you?”

“No - no.” Oliver shakes his head.

“Don’t quote Scripture at you?” Now he’s definitely smiling. “Or don’t call you Olly? Because I gotta tell you, you don’t look like an Oliver tonight. You look like an Olly. A little… softer.” 

His thumb tucks under the point of Oliver’s chin. “Or,” he says. “Don’t love you. Is what you’re trying to say, isn’t it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Oliver manages, the words coming out far too fast. “You _don’t_ love me.”

“Maybe I don’t. Maybe I do. I don’t think you get to tell me how I feel.” Despite the reproach, Danny brings his other hand up to slide it between Oliver’s cheek and the pillow. 

“This is about Alton and Eli,” Oliver says desperately. “You’re just letting it overflow. This is not about us, not about _me_ -”

“Ah,” Danny says. “There we go.”

Whatever Oliver’s said, it’s resolved something for Danny. He leans in even closer. “Let me make it easy for you. I want to kiss you. You, Oliver Foley, not just anyone wearing your face. _You._ And I have wanted that for… since I met you.” 

Oliver shudders. He can’t help himself.

“You’re amazing, just you, just Olly. You’re so good. You’re so _kind_. To everyone, but - to _me_ , you’re kind, you’re always -” The words leave him. He gathers himself and tries again. “I see you. Not just Alton. You know I do. You made sure I do. And that’s - that’s what I love. That you want me to know you care - that I matter to you.”

“You do matter,” someone says, with Oliver’s voice. Most of it. He doesn’t quite recognise it.

“So let me show you how much I appreciate you. I’m not Eli, I won’t break if you touch me and I probably won’t die if you don’t - probably. But I want to kiss you. And I want you to kiss me.” Danny’s voice is very tender. “We’re alone, on this beautiful night, shooting’s almost over, I’m dead sober and so are you. And don’t you need some love?” He reaches up to stroke Oliver’s hair back. “You can’t tell me you don’t. You’re all in knots. You’ve been hugging yourself all night. So why don’t you just... let _me_ do it? I’ll be good to you, Olly, let me -”

“No.” It _aches_ , to be seen and known so clearly when he has so few defenses left. “If I start - I don’t know if I can bear to stop, Danny, I don’t know, so I can’t start, don’t you see?”

“ _Don’t_ stop,” Danny says, and grabs Oliver’s wrist so that he can flatten Oliver’s palm against the side of his neck, behind the vicious corner of his jaw.

He’s _so_ warm.

Oliver makes a noise, half whine, half cry, all surrender, and crushes Danny to him. 

Danny yelps against his mouth, but rallies fast and slides both his hands into Oliver’s hair, the better to hold him at the angle that lets Danny nip at his bottom lip just sharp enough to make Oliver shiver. They come together like magnets, locked into each other by forces Oliver doesn’t understand and can’t resist any longer; things snap into place with Danny’s mouth on his.

This, this is what fits into the hollow place in his chest. Skin, and touching, and needing, and the soft-edged pain of Danny’s hands in his hair.

The first paroxysm of want, like a hunger pang, passes and neither of them let go, but the kisses become slower and more gentle as Oliver remembers control. He rolls them over, puts Danny on his back, and slips kisses over the glass-sharp jawline and down his neck, into the hollow above his collarbone, pushing Danny’s shirt aside with the point of his nose. Danny curls around him and nuzzles at his hair as best he can. 

“Yes,” he breathes, hot on Oliver’s scalp. “Yes.”

Oliver moves back up to the soft place just above Danny’s shirt collar, and presses his mouth against shifting muscles and the speeding beat of Danny’s pulse. He wants, deep and animal, to set his teeth into it, but he settles for sucking gently at it - until Danny clutches at the back of his head with a sharp _ah_ and pulls him in tighter.

“Do it,” he gasps. “Leave a mark, fuck, I want it -”

Can he? Can he have Danny like that, here and now - can Danny really be his for the night, his to mark up, his to claim? Does he - is that even what he wants? Or is that Alton, under Oliver’s skin, still trying to own and control his strange, pale boy?

Danny throws his head back to give Oliver all of his neck. “Come on,” he says urgently, “please -”; he still hasn’t let go of Oliver’s head, and the words buzz against Oliver’s lips. 

Oliver wishes Danny still had his long hair. Anything to hide in, anything to dilute the moonlight to the point where he doesn’t know what he must look like, hunched over Danny’s splayed body and mouthing at his neck like a wild beast, or a vampire. Or a teenager.

Still, Danny wants it - wants _him_ , and God help him, it’s too good to be wanted, too tempting to do exactly what Danny asks just to be able to please someone.

There is a middle ground. Reality seems distant and uninteresting, but in the morning he’ll still have to face it, and it’ll have to put makeup on anything that shows over Danny’s clothes. It’s only practical - yes, practical and sensible, and he tugs at Danny’s shirt collar until the line of bone gleams. _There_ , he thinks -

Danny huffs, and wiggles until Oliver sits up and he can get at his own buttons enough to lay his whole chest bare. No mystery. He bites his lip and looks up at Oliver, and shivers the whole length of his body. “Well?” he says.

“You’re gonna freeze,” Oliver says gently, and starts to pull the shirt closed again over Danny’s belly.

The look Danny gives him is equal parts resigned patience and irrepressible deviltry. He strokes Oliver’s wrist. “So keep me warm.”

Oliver lies back down on top of him, draped over his hip and chest. Danny doesn’t actually need keeping warm - not in the least. He’s radiant with heat, the metabolism of 23 and arousal besides stoking him to a glow like a branding iron. And yet he’s still shivering. So it’s something else, and Oliver won’t go farther until it’s sorted.

He smoothes a palm over Danny’s chest. All the lean muscle that hid under Eli’s clothes is there to be enjoyed, and he does enjoy it; but this isn’t really about that. This is - this is gentling, the way Oliver would do with a skittish horse.

“I’m not afraid,” Danny whispers, lacing his fingers over the point of Oliver’s shoulder. “I know it looks like I am, but I’m not. Just touch me.”

“I am touching you.” Oliver laughs against Danny’s neck, and keeps petting him, broad sweeps of his hand over the flat stomach - still fluttering a little with tension - and the slim chest.

“You know what I mean.” To remove all doubt, Danny rolls his hips, so Oliver’s fingers skim the waistband of his jeans. “ _Touch_ me. Please, Olly -”

“Shh,” Oliver says, and leans up on one elbow to kiss him. “Relax. Mustn’t hurry it. If we’re doing this, wouldn’t you - wouldn’t you rather I took my time?”

“ _No_ ,” Danny says. “No, I wouldn’t - I want you _now_. I’ve waited long enough.”

Oliver edges over, covering more of Danny with his own body. If he lies down now, Danny won’t be able to move him. “Give me just a little longer.” And he lets himself go boneless, slides his hands up under Danny’s shoulders, tangles their feet together - puts his cheek on Danny’s shoulder, and breathes until he feels Danny’s heartbeat slow a little. “Good,” he says. “Perfect.”

Danny gives a breathless laugh. “Some seduction. I’m half naked with the legendary Oliver Foley and all he wants to do is lie on top of me.”

“Not _all_.” He kisses the skin his mouth is already pressed to. “What do you know about _the legendary Oliver Foley_ , anyway. I haven’t seen him in fuckin’ _years_.”

“I know,” Danny murmurs, “that I’ve never seen anyone in a sex tape try so hard to make their partner feel loved.”

Something clenches hard in his chest, and now he’s the one who has to slow his breathing. “You were never old enough to have seen that,” he mumbles, even though that isn’t the problem, it isn’t, the problem is the way Danny is holding him. Tight. Solid.

“I’m old enough now,” Danny says. “It was pretty educational, you know. I learned a lot about pleasing women. But also -” He pets Oliver’s back in the same smooth motion Oliver was just using on him. “I learned that I really, _really_ wanted someone to look at me the way you looked at her.”

“Oh,” Oliver says weakly. 

“I know you’re not that guy anymore.” Danny’s hand cups the back of his neck. “And you’re trying to be old and boring and _responsible_ now, with all these weird hangups about making out with _very_ hot people who want you desperately.” Oliver feels the laugh in Danny’s chest. “But you haven’t forgotten how to do that, have you?”

“Do what?” He’s lost the referent of Danny’s sentence with the way Danny’s tracing patterns on his scalp.

“Look at me. Come here.” He’s not sure if that’s an answer, or just an instruction, but Danny’s pulling at him and he goes up on one elbow.

“Good,” Danny says. He looks calm, sweet and centred - everything that Oliver is not. “Now. Don’t overthink it. Yes or no. Do you want me?”

“Yes,” Oliver says, and it surprises him how easily the word is spoken. “But it’s -”

“No.” Danny presses one long finger to Oliver’s lips. “It isn’t. Every time you start thinking, you panic. But I’m okay, and you’re okay, and this - this is so much better than okay, this is _fantastic_. So stay out of your own head, and concentrate on me. Here. Like this.”

Danny’s mouth against his is soft and undemanding, at first - just the establishment of the facts: _this is me, this is you, we’re kissing now._ He isn’t hesitant, nor does he seem unsure of his welcome, but very slowly, he pulls Oliver back down on top of him.

Oliver lets himself be moved, shifted, arranged; lets Danny show him exactly where Danny wants his hands, up high on his sides, where Oliver can feel him breathing. Danny’s hands are under the edge of Oliver’s shirt, just lingering on the tops of his hips. And Danny’s still kissing him, still, always, like the ocean lapping at his toes. There’s the promise of so much more, such a weightless depth of wonders he could discover if he just dives in. But it will wait for him to be ready.

Nobody’s bothered to be this careful with Oliver in years. Not the legendary Oliver Foley, no - why would they? Surely he of all people would be beyond sexual anxiety. He’ll be up for it, he will. Just grab him and go.

It’s entirely foreign to him to be treated as though he’s something precious, or able to be scared away.

Still, the tide is coming in, ever so slowly. Danny’s jeans are tight enough that they can’t hide much, and he’s trying so hard not to squirm that Oliver can feel the start-stop shifts of his abs and thighs. 

He remembers some of what it was like to be Danny’s age, although those weren’t years he was really there for. Mostly, though, what he does remember is flashes like this - sweat prickling across his chest and a warm body, any warm body, someone kind if he was lucky and merely willing to pretend if not - sweat, and hunger, and wanting that couldn’t be satisfied by having.

“Danny,” he whispers, breaking the kiss. He hovers with the point of his nose still pressed to Danny’s cheek, lips just out of range. 

Danny blinks like a sleepy cat. “Yeah?”

“Tell me what you want.” His weight is on his elbows, and he shifts into Danny, just a little. An invitation. He’s not fully hard, himself, but he’ll get there if he pays any attention to it. 

Danny gasps - “Nnh, please, that - or anything, _anything_ you want.”

He shivers under Oliver, and Oliver reaches up to stroke his cheek. “I asked you, darlin’.”

That last word makes Danny’s eyes go absolutely huge. There’s a terrible, terrifying openness to his face - the look of an unspoken but dearly cherished wish, granted.

 _Oh,_ Oliver thinks.

He’s seen that look before. Not quite on Danny, though the drunken night was close, but many times on other people, and he knows it. It means that all along, he’s misunderstood.

Danny is _his_.

Danny is his, and Danny has probably been trying to tell him that from the very beginning.

He can’t not kiss him, with that realisation so stark and fresh - a hungrier, more emphatic kiss than anything bar that first pounce. 

“Beautiful,” Oliver murmurs when he comes up for air. “You want _everything_ , don’t you.”

Danny’s chewing on his lower lip and trying so hard not to look as though he’s aware of how aroused he is. But even in the blue-grey moonlight it’s obvious he’s blushing halfway down his chest. It must be taking a truly immense amount of force of will for him not to be touching himself right now. And what a picture he makes - and it’s all for Oliver - and how Oliver wants to do honour to that gift and take him apart, bit by painstaking bit, until he’s ruined Danny for all other men.

But not here. Not overlooking the whole city, not where anyone could just pull up beside them and find them starkers on the hood of a ‘74 Chevy Caprice. It’s probably something Oliver, in his heyday, could have weathered - he’s not entirely sure he hasn’t, in fact. But it’s not what Danny needs, not now and not ever. Danny deserves better.

“Come on,” he says, and rolls off Danny and the car, landing fairly easily on his feet. “I can’t take you to bed when there’s no bed.”

Danny tries to sit up. It doesn’t go well: he falls back against the pillow with a dizzy little groan, and a nerveless hand over his eyes like a swooning Victorian heroine.

Oliver chuckles. “D’you need a hand, there?”

Danny opens one eye. “I can’t feel my legs. Or my face. Jesus.”

“You should be used to me touching you by now,” Oliver says, but he comes round the car to Danny’s side. “Haven’t I been doing it for weeks?”

He takes Danny’s elbow and pulls him up; Danny leans into him, bonelessly heavy. “You were touching Eli,” Danny says, muffled against his chest. “I did my best not to get involved.”

Something about that is just crushing, even with Danny clinging to him. Even though he did the same damn thing. Maybe _because_ he did, and now he hates himself for all the time he’s wasted. 

He can’t stop himself pulling Danny closer, turning him until he slips off the hood of the car and his arms go around Oliver’s neck and he’s almost standing, would be standing if his legs would hold him. Oliver wedges himself between Danny’s knees and kisses him until the heartbreak lets go and he can breathe again.

It solves one problem, but not the other. Danny’s shaking in his arms, tiny hitches of his hips up into Oliver’s like reflexive spasms; his eyes are dazed and unfocused, but he tries to find Oliver’s mouth again the way a blinded, drowning diver looks for the regulator. 

“It’s okay,” Oliver finds himself saying, without really knowing why. “It’s okay, love, it’s okay.”

Danny sounds like Eli, now, the trace of a whine on every breath. “Please,” he whispers, against Oliver’s cheek. 

He wants to ask, _please what_ , but he knows.

And Danny is so very appealing like this, almost too turned on to function - but it isn’t all mercy, nor aesthetics, that makes Oliver’s decision. It is also the undeniable strategic truth that they will have a long drive back to the hotel, and by then Danny will be ready again, but so much more tractable than if Oliver just leaves him to suffer now. There is a way to do this subtly - and he knows damn well from Danny’s face that it will be fast.

He reaches for Danny’s belt buckle, stroking his thumb over the soft skin of Danny’s belly. Danny’s hands are shaking too badly to be much help, but he tries, and their fingers tangle up in each other just in time for Danny to get his jeans open.

Danny’s not wearing any underwear, which is at once surprising and not at all surprising. It’s a time saver. 

He lets Danny guide their joined hands to his cock, standing out proud and ready, so Danny can show him how he likes it. Oliver’s always been a quick learner at this sort of thing, even if it’s been a while since he last touched any tackle but his own; in no time, Danny is panting against his shoulder with a mouthful of Oliver’s jumper between his teeth. It muffles his pretty little noises a little, just enough that maybe they won’t carry. Oliver doesn’t want them to. All privacy concerns aside, they’re _his_. He’s earned them. He doesn’t want to share.

It’s different, but not _very_ different from this angle. He imagines turning Danny around, and wonders if that would be better - but then he couldn’t kiss him, and he finds he wants that more than almost anything. Although Danny’s soft whimpers are giving him plenty of alternative ideas.

The noises are just as pretty, he discovers, when Danny’s making them directly into his mouth.

He’s so thankful he’s older, and tired, and able to retain at least a fractional amount of sense. Enough to break the kiss to lick his palm, wet and sloppy, and close his hand back around Danny - _oh_ , that’s a beautiful note Danny’s hit, shredded through the middle, a blessing and a reward.

 _Come on_ , he thinks, _come on, come on,_ like he’s watching a racehorse pounding over the grass to a so-close finish line.

“I’m gonna,” Danny gasps, and Oliver tucks Danny’s head against his neck and cradles him there - where he belongs.

“Do,” he whispers.

As though it’s a spell, Danny bucks up into their hands and goes taut, drawn like a bow, as he comes. He’s silent, not even breathing for a long moment; out of everything that’s happened so far tonight, this shocks Oliver the most.

It is a very long few seconds before he relaxes, and starts laughing exhaustedly against Oliver’s shoulder. “Oh my God,” he says. “I’m sorry. Wow.”

Oliver, warm clear through, turns his head enough to kiss Danny’s hair. “No. Thank you for that.” 

It’s the gentlemanly thing to say, but he means it. Somewhere along the way the hollow place in him has been filled until he’s forgotten exactly where the edges were, and there’s nothing left but a real, true, abject sort of gratitude he hasn’t felt in a long time.

“I should _definitely_ be thanking you.” Danny leans back, brings their sticky hands up where he can see them, and considers the mess for a moment before giving Oliver’s fingers a businesslike lick, and then another. “I didn’t do anything.”

Oliver strokes the back of his clean, dry hand over Danny’s face, and lets the admiration ring clear in his voice, because even if Danny doesn’t understand where it’s coming from, at least he should hear it. “You’re amazing, you know that?”

The next lick pauses in the middle, for Danny to kiss Oliver’s knuckles, and smirk over them. “I’m not. I’m just _really_ hot. I can understand the confusion, though.”

“Sure, sure.” There is absolutely nothing stopping him from kissing Danny’s forehead, he realises, even though it seems impossible - he can just lean in and do it, and taste the sweat on his lips after.

Oliver _wants_ this. Too much to be reckless with him beyond little things, too much to run the risk of half-doing it or doing it wrong. So much that it compels him to be slow, to be gentle and kind. 

He is not Alton. He is _nothing like_ Alton. And if Danny wants him -

\- Danny wants to be loved. That’s what he’s asked for.

Oliver… Oliver can do that.

Danny’s hair is sticking to his forehead, just a little. Oliver pushes it back, and then is momentarily distracted by how soft it is without the product they use to keep it from getting too flyaway on set.

“Why didn’t I do this when your hair was long?” he says, watching Danny’s eyes drift shut under the petting.

“Something, something, responsibility?” Danny suggests. 

Oliver snorts. “Stop making me feel like I’m no fun.”

“You’re plenty of fun.” Danny gestures vaguely to himself. “Did I not look like I was enjoying that?”

“You did. You really did. It’s nice to play to such an enthusiastic crowd.” Oliver leans in and kisses him again, properly, for no other reason than because he wants to. “But you know, if you want a second act, we’re really going to have to have a change of venue.”

“Shame.” Danny blinks slowly. “I was digging the Theatre Under the Stars vibe.”

“Open-air performances do have their charm,” Oliver agrees. “But consider - a setting somewhat more. Intimate.”

“ _Intimate_ , hm?” Danny’s mouth is just made for the smile that’s spreading across it right now.

“Come on,” Oliver says decisively. “Get in the car. I’ll drive.”

There’s very little protest. He lets Danny arrange himself comfortably on the banquette while he folds and stows the picnic blanket and the pillows - he’s not going to mention it, but he can see how Danny’s eyelids are drooping. Nothing wrong with that. He can have a little rest, a little recovery. He’ll need his energy later. 

The car starts smoothly, and purrs on down the highway, docile and pleased, nary a jerk or a shudder with Oliver in control; when they hit the freeway he glances over at Danny, striped with intermittent streetlights, and sees that he’s asleep.

\---

The speedbump and the violent brightness of the overhead fluorescents in the hotel’s parking garage wake Danny; Oliver’s a little sad to lose the chance to do it himself, but there are probably cameras down here and it’s just as well he doesn’t have to.

At least he gets to watch Danny come out of the soft muzzy phase where he’s still not entirely sure where, or who, he is, but he smiles for Oliver anyway.

“I was dreaming about you,” Danny says. 

Oliver gives him a theatrical cringe. “Oh, God. I’m so sorry.”

“It was nice.” Danny pats vaguely at his arm. “We were dancing. Can you waltz or did I imagine that?”

“I can, actually, but probably best not to make me prove it.” Oliver pilots the car deftly into a parking space, and pulls the handbrake as he shifts it into park. “Unless you were also imagining me finding the whole process terribly humiliating.”

Danny shakes his head. “No, I wasn’t - it was very romantic, I’ll have you know. You were confident - graceful.”

“Then you were definitely dreaming.” Oliver grins at Danny. “Come on, can you work your arms and legs yet? We should put the top up.”

It only takes a few minutes to get the car sorted out, a semi-coordinated dance that has nothing at all in common with a waltz, dreamlike or otherwise. This leaves them with only Danny’s pillows and the bag he brought the sandwiches in.

“I’ll just drop these off,” Danny says, as they get into the lift. “Unless you’d rather come back to my place?”

Oliver’s a fully grown adult, and so is Danny, and the offer’s already been made and accepted. So there’s absolutely no reason it should feel so difficult to look at Danny in this moment and say, “No, come on up to mine. 903. Just… just knock. I’ll be waiting.”

“All right,” Danny says, and wafts the lightest kiss over Oliver’s cheekbone as he leaves the lift. “Be there soon.”

Oliver is powerfully reminded of the crushing, early-twenties terror of bringing someone back to a room that may or may not say anything good about the personal habits of he who lives there. At least he has five minutes to do a quick whip-round, collect the dirty socks, be grateful housekeeping’s made up the bed, pull his boots off, apply a much-too-belated toothbrush and debate undressing - too eager? too desperate? one more button on the shirt undone, or leave it? - before there’s a quiet knock on the door. He leaves the shirt. His hair’s unfixable. He’ll have to do.

In the atmospherically dim, warm light of the hallway, Danny’s eyes have amber sparks - unexpected rich strong-tea brown, as though someone’s lit a fire in him and now he glows.

“Hi,” he says, and smiles in a way that Oliver finds strange until he’s able to parse it: this is Danny Bloomfield, feeling shy and very slightly overwhelmed but trying to put an extremely brave face on it. “May I come in?”

“I was hoping you would,” Oliver says; “any longer in here on my own and I’d probably have started screaming just to hear the echo.”

This is the right thing to say, and gets him a much, much better smile. “The walls are probably pretty thick, up here. I bet you could, and nobody would make too big a deal out of it.” Danny steps in, and raps gently at the wall. “See: ludicrous amounts of money are a very efficient insulator.”

Oliver raises an eyebrow at Danny. “You mock me now - but you haven’t slept on that bed.”

The tip of Danny’s tongue is pink between his lips. “Yet,” he says. 

He wanders slowly into the room, so much larger and better-appointed than his own, and does a leisurely twirl in the middle of the space. “Armchairs,” he says incredulously, “and a chaise longue? Do they expect you to be hosting salons?”

“I never know what hotel designers expect,” Oliver admits. “But you’d fit right in if I did, wouldn’t you. Do you up as the louche young aristocrat, Byron with a cigarette and a hamsa necklace, discussing poetry and making eyes at the society matrons.”

Danny drapes himself over the chaise, backwards - he kicks his feet up to cross them at the ankle on the arm of the chaise, and lets his head hang just off the edge of the long cushion. “ _He walks in beauty, like the night/ Of cloudless climes and starry skies;_ ” Danny recites softly, locking his gaze on Oliver’s. Oliver can’t look away. “ _And all that’s best of dark and bright/ Meet in his aspect and his eyes;/ Thus mellowed to that tender light/ Which heaven to gaudy day denies._ ” He licks his lips. “I don’t want the society matrons,” he says.

Oliver has to swallow to clear his throat and keep his voice even. “That’d hardly be the point. They’d want you, and it’s just good enough fun to be wanted that you’d keep them that way.” He leans his hip against one of the armchairs, takes a deep breath and asks the dangerous question as flippantly as he can manage: “What _do_ you want, young Bloomfield?”

Danny tucks his arm behind his head, and holds out his other hand to beckon Oliver nearer. “The tall, dark, handsome, _brooding_ lord of the manor, ideally intending to sweep me off my feet and carry me away, white horse optional, passionate ravishing and/or bodice ripping essential, please and thank you.”

“Bodice ripping?” Oliver can’t help the shape his eyebrows make, but he hopes the grin softens it. “Danny, you’re barely wearing a shirt.”

Danny smiles the slyest, most triumphant smile and stretches on the chaise longue so that said shirt gapes, exposing most of his chest. “Then I guess you can go straight to the passionate ravishing.”

“Well, I haven’t got a horse with me,” Oliver says philosophically, “so. Needs must.” 

And he lunges, and slides his arms under Danny’s back and thighs; in half a second, Danny’s in his arms, kicking and flailing futilely - “put me down, put me _down_ ” - but clutching onto Oliver’s shoulders in a way that makes it very clear that in fact the last thing he wants is to be put down.

A handful of steps and he can throw Danny onto the bed hard enough to bounce, vault onto the mattress after him, and sit squarely on his hips. Then he pulls himself up very straight and stares into the far distance with his arms crossed over his chest and the sternest, most distant look he can muster.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Danny demands, though the effect’s a bit spoiled by how he can’t stop laughing.

“Shh,” Oliver says, and lays a finger across Danny’s mouth. “I’m _brooding_.”

His mistake, of course, is that he isn’t looking at Danny. So when two hands grab his elbows and yank forwards and down, he falls, landing heavily on Danny, chest to chest, chin hooked over Danny’s shoulder. Danny _oof_ s but it's his own fault and Oliver doesn’t care. 

This insolence, this playfulness - it’s water in the desert to him, and he scrapes his teeth over the corner of Danny's jaw, sucks at it for a moment, and thanks everything that this boy is here, in his bed, despite everything Oliver’s done to get in his own way. 

What a treasure he is, cat-eyed and sparkling, all soft hands, soft lips, soft noises as Oliver licks gently at his pulse; his fingers splay out on Oliver’s shoulders and hold him where he is. 

For a little while they’re happy like that, just getting used to each other in this still-novel context. Danny pets Oliver, kneads at the knots in his back until he’s nearly purring - he knows that the massage isn’t really doing much, but that's totally irrelevant when Danny’s trying so hard to kiss him even from this angle.

At some point Oliver shucks his shirt, pushes Danny’s back too, and spends a few minutes mapping out a path with his nose and lips, opening up the inward hunch of Danny’s shoulders so that the hollow place below his collarbone melts away.

A thought strikes him that he can’t shake off: he’s shriving Danny with kisses, forgiving him with every touch, until the last traces of Eli’s sorrow and pain, doubt and guilt, are banished from his body.

With two fingers, he tips Danny's head back, and drags a kiss from the soft place under his chin to the daggerpoint of his sternum, from the junction of his left arm and shoulder across his pectorals to the same place on his right shoulder.

“What’re you doing,” Danny murmurs. 

Oliver props himself up on one arm to look at him. “A blessing for you.”

Danny raises an eyebrow. “A blessing?” Something very wicked happens at the corners of his mouth - and he reaches out and taps Oliver’s chest. “None of that God business with me, I told you.”

“You’re not,” Oliver says, with a deep, despairing sort of respect. Oh, but he is, and he knows he is, and Oliver has walked right into this one.

“This isn’t about what God has done for you, my boy.” The line is entirely different in Danny’s mouth from how it felt in Oliver’s. “This is about what I will do for you.” And there’s the tap on Oliver’s collarbone. “And by extension.” And Danny’s hand lingers on his neck, so slow that Oliver shivers.

Their lips move in unison, although only Danny makes any sound. “What you can do for me.”

Danny smiles, and Oliver knows at that moment that as much as Danny is his, Danny’s staked a claim of his own, and Oliver isn’t sure he can refute it. Or even that he should try.

It’s been too long, far too long, since anyone wanted Oliver to belong to them, in a way Oliver trusted to be genuine; like a blanket, sometimes that feeling stifles him and he has to kick free of it, but right now he’s cold, and he can't help it - he wants it, wants to clutch it to him and hide his face in the softness of it. 

So when Danny pushes him onto his back and says, gently, “Lie back,” Oliver does.

It’s a warm little fear, a strange quiver in his belly that increases as Danny straddles him and catches Oliver’s face between his hands.

For a very long moment that’s all he does. One side of his mouth quirks, deeper and deeper; he looks, and looks, and shakes his head the tiniest amount.

“What?” Oliver says.

Danny takes a deep breath, and lets it out again, and says softly, “I’m _so_ lucky.”

Then, before Oliver can ask him to explain, because that can’t be right, Danny’s leaned down and kissed him on the forehead - “Stay,” he whispers, and leaves a fingertip on Oliver’s cheek for a second or two to underline the sentiment. And then he’s up and off Oliver, off the bed. Oliver lies there, transfixed, watching him shed his clothes with the extreme efficiency of someone who’s done theatre and has had to do a complete costume change in sixty seconds. It doesn’t even occur to him that he could use this time to get out of his own jeans until Danny’s already down to skin.

So much skin, all of it softly palely golden, all of him as long and slim and delicate as the fingers he’s sliding into Oliver’s hair as he sits down on the edge of the bed.

“Oh, Olly,” he breathes. “Look at you.”

Apart from the inherent impossibility of the statement, he doesn't know what there would be to look at if he could see it. He supposes he's fairly fit, for his age, and Alton has him at the lighter end of healthy weight, but he's not what he used to be and he knows it. It doesn't make sense for Danny to be looking at him like he hung the moon.

Fuck’s sake, he’s not even _naked_ yet.

Danny, though - Danny’s… Danny’s mouthwatering, now that he’s let himself think it. His lips ache with how they aren’t being kissed, and his breath goes short.

“Come here,” he pleads. He should be kissing Danny, he should be - 

“Not yet,” Danny says, and his smile goes a little rueful. “I see you, Olly. I see what you're doing. Maybe better than you do. And if I let you -” He cups the back of Oliver’s neck for a second, then slides his hands out to Oliver’s shoulders. “You’ll just touch me until I forget that you need things too. And that’s not right.”

One of his hands comes back over Oliver’s throat, up and under his chin the same way he did to Danny just a few minutes ago. He bares his throat to Danny, not without trepidation. 

But Danny’s gentle. So gentle - _too_ gentle.

He bends down to brush his lips over Oliver’s pulse - quick and then gone. Dot, dot, dot across his shoulder; he settles for a moment in the hollow of Oliver’s throat, breathes, bites idly at the thin chain of his necklace, but then the other shoulder needs kissing, for the sake of symmetry, and he lays his forehead against it. 

“I can’t believe I’m actually finally doing this,” he says, and laughs. His fingertips flirt over Oliver’s chest, brush a nipple, trace the contour of the muscle. “And you’re just going to lie here and let me.”

Oliver’s not sure if that’s meant as a rebuke or not. It has to be, doesn’t it? Danny’s laughing, but it’s selfish of him, it is. He raises a hand - 

Without looking, Danny pins it to the mattress. “No,” he says gently, which is definitely a rebuke, because he’s sat up now and Oliver can see his face. “This is for you.”

“I don’t,” he starts, and there the sentence hangs, stuck in his throat, until he can work out how to finish it. Want it? No, anyone could tell that’s a lie, and it would be unfair to Danny to even make him think it. 

Need it? 

Deserve it? 

“I promised you,” Danny says softly. He brings the hand he’s trapped up to his lips, kisses the back of it, and puts it back down again. “I promised you I’d be good to you. You need it, I know you do, and I can - I can help.”

Damn it, Danny’s being _careful_ with him again, and it burns. 

“I know we care about each other. I know we want each other. Now, that’s enough - you don’t have to love me. Although I have to say, I recommend it. I’m very loveable. Cute, low maintenance, good mileage, overall excellent return on investment.” He’s teasing, but he isn’t. “But that doesn’t even matter. I’m here, you’re here, and you can’t tell me we don’t love each other at least enough for tonight to be something pretty special.” He strokes his thumb over Oliver’s hand. “I have thought about this _so_ much. And I want you to let me show you how much love you should just… have, always, because you’re amazing, and you _do_ deserve it. Will you at least _try_ to believe me when I say this is right, and good - and okay?”

There don’t seem to be words underneath how much Oliver wants that to be true.

He must look like an idiot, staring up at Danny with his mouth hanging open as if there will somehow be articulate thoughts magically flowing forth. Or Danny gets bored waiting for him.

Either way, Danny takes pity on Oliver. “Just try,” he says again. “That’s all I ask.” 

“I want to,” Oliver says, haltingly. “I do. But it’s not as easy as that.”

“I know,” Danny says. There’s something in his eyes for a moment that is much too old for his face. And then he smiles, and it vanishes. “You know what is, however, spectacularly easy? Especially for you?”

He leans down and brushes the tip of his nose against Oliver’s.

“Me,” he whispers, and closes the kiss.

Familiar territory, now, at last. Danny’s sweet on his tongue, mint and the clean sugarishness of aspartame, and it cheers Oliver somehow to realise that he, too, was nervous enough to brush his teeth.

He wants to deepen the kiss, to make it more of what they shared out under the stars. But when he tries, Danny pulls back. “Ah,” he says. “You made me slow down. Now it’s your turn.”

There’s a light in his eyes Oliver hasn’t truly seen there in months, since the table read. Danny in his purest form, untainted by sorrow or peril, is magnetically confident, and it suddenly occurs to Oliver that perhaps this moment - this moment right here, while Danny nuzzles that terribly worrying mouth into the crook of Oliver’s elbow and follows the long blue veins under the soft skin of Oliver’s forearm all the way to his wrist - this might just be how other people feel around him.

He doesn’t think he could pull together the strength to stop Danny even if he wanted to. But he can’t imagine any circumstance right now in which he would want to. He has lost - he is lost. Danny has him.

Danny lifts Oliver’s hand again and presses it to his cheek, folding his fingers over the sharp edges of his face. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to do,” he says. It would be conversational if he wasn’t looking so intently at the button of Oliver’s jeans. “I think you’ll find it rewarding if you let me.”

“Danny,” Oliver whispers. “Danny, Danny - stop asking what I’ll let you do, love.” His breath seems to crack his chest open. “You can do anything.”

“Maybe I like hearing how much you want whatever I’m about to do,” Danny says, and smirks against Oliver’s palm. “For example. May I please take your clothes off?”

Oliver nods, already reaching for his waistband, but Danny bats his hand away. “I didn’t ask if you could. I asked if _I_ could.”

“Oh,” Oliver says. He already feels dizzy, with Danny leaning over him like this. “Then - yes. Please.”

Unlike Danny, Oliver did put on jocks today, as something of a last line of defense for the idea that he could behave himself - that he wasn’t going to end up exactly where he is now, with Danny’s clever fingers working the button of his jeans loose and drawing down the zip so that he can slide them down over Oliver’s hips. It seems somehow fitting that the end of that idea comes with Danny leaning in to breathe hot and damp over the growing shape below the soft black fabric.

It’s a moment of attention that Oliver craves more of, immediately, but Danny must really have meant it when he said he would slow down; he straightens up again much too soon, though he licks his lips, and goes back to undressing Oliver as slowly and gently as he’s ever been undressed.

He peels Oliver’s socks off with the cuffs of his jeans, dumps all of it in a pile at the end of the bed and caresses Oliver’s newly bared right ankle, first with his fingertips and then with his lips - a kiss to the sharp protrusion of his ankle bone, and then up into the soft hair on his leg, along the dip where his calf muscle meets his shinbone.

Oliver can’t help how his knees fall open, but it’s to make it easier, isn’t it? To make it easier for Danny to lavish kisses on the soft hollow at the side of his knee, where it’s not as ticklish as the back, and to give him space when he turns to do the same to the other side. And to make it easier, when Danny finally decides to put him out of his misery and kiss up his thighs to the creases at his hips.

The jocks aren’t doing much to protect his modesty anymore, and he really wants them _off_ , now, before the elastic waistband gets even more inconvenient. “Danny,” he says, “babe, please, just -”

“You want me to get rid of these for you?” Danny says playfully, and hooks a finger under the elastic. “They are getting in my way a little. I guess we can do that.”

Honestly, Oliver wouldn’t care if Danny ripped them off him, but he’s gentle enough about it and he lets Oliver help, shimmying them down his thighs as Danny climbs out from between his legs so he can kick them off completely. 

His cock is heavy on his belly, and he’d touch it, he’d be touching it already if Danny wasn’t right there and must be, _must_ be about to - except that he’s staring down at it, a little wide-eyed.

“Jesus,” he says reverently. “It’s even nicer in person.”

“I’m glad I live up to my press,” Oliver says, a little tightly. “I don’t suppose you’d fancy doing more than looking at it?”

Danny laughs. “Oh, Olly. There’s _so much_ I want to do. Can I touch you?”

“Of _course_ you fucking can,” Oliver says. And it feels overemphatic, desperate, like he’s just barking at Danny because he’s horny, but - he’s done with waiting, he’s done with being patient and forbearing and reluctant and responsible; he’s made the decision and leapt and now he’s falling and Danny’s either going to catch him or he’s not.

And then Danny’s hand closes around Oliver’s cock.

He’s not proud of the noise he makes. Nor of the full-body twitch like he’s just taken a cattle prod to the ribs. But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all. Danny straddles his thigh, and leans up and in to kiss Oliver’s shock-slackened mouth, and kiss him, and kiss him, as his hand moves so slowly that Oliver thinks he might go mad.

He would speed things up on his own, but Danny’s pinned him down so effectively that he can’t move his hips without throwing Danny off him, and if he does that Danny might stop. Which would be worse, probably, than this slow torture. He puts his hands on Danny’s ass instead to give them somewhere nice to be.

Rushing back to him, all at once: it’s been so long now since the last time anyone did this, held him the way Danny is holding him, a hand on his face and a hand on his cock. It’s all anyone needs to have him entirely at their mercy. So he makes himself relax and enjoy the sparking of his nerves, enjoy even the fact that he can’t do anything but what Danny wants him to do, until Danny decides otherwise. And judging by the slow roll of Danny’s hips, there will be other things Danny will want, sooner or later.

An idea occurs to him, and he reaches out blindly to the side of him and tugs the little drawer of the bedside table open. He’s a traditionalist in some ways, and in other ways he’s also still very much the legendary Oliver Foley, or at least someone who’s learned from his mistakes, and in that drawer there’s a full box of condoms and a bottle of lube.

“I see,” Danny says, in between kisses. “Oliver, you brazen hussy.”

“It’s a suggestion,” Oliver says. “A good one.”

“And what -” _kiss -_ “do you think -” _kiss -_ “I should do with those?”

“Put one on me.” Oliver shivers. “And then -” It feels like a step off a cliff, but he can't stop himself admitting it: “Anything, literally anything, Danny, there’s nothing you could do to me that I don’t want from you.”

Danny stills for a moment, and Oliver sees him try to take in the statement. “Wow,” he breathes, eventually. “Okay. Okay.” He runs a hand over his face, and muffles a tiny chuckle into it: “Now it almost seems anticlimactic when I ask you if I can suck you off. It’s just… I’ve wanted to for so long, and -”

He’s blushing. How adorable. “If that’s what your heart desires, love,” Oliver says, and means it, “far be it from me to ever turn down a motivated, enthusiastic blowjob.”

“You could… you could have me, after?” Danny offers, shyly. “However you want.”

Oliver reaches up and strokes his hot cheek. “Let’s see how we go, all right, beautiful?”

“Okay,” Danny says, then visibly gives in to an impulse; he lies down on top of Oliver again and buries his face in Oliver’s neck for the space of a few breaths. Oliver pets his back, his shoulders, his head, everything he can reach. 

_Mine_ , he thinks, and the simplicity of that thought centres him.

He can pinpoint the moment Danny rallies: sharp teeth nip at his trapezius for a second before a gentle kiss soothes it. Then Danny sits up and leans over him to reach the box of condoms.

“This isn't even open,” he says, as he fumbles with it. “Were you just that optimistic?”

“No sense in being unprepared for life,” Oliver says. “Especially the fun bits.”

Danny shakes his head. “Not even optimistic. _Confident_. Because you’re Oliver Foley, and who wouldn’t?”

“Says the man who is about to.” Oliver raises an eyebrow at him, and adds, “I certainly hope.”

“What’s it called when you hope for something that’s already happening?” Danny’s eyes are very big and very dark. “Something that is already - in your lap, you know, but you just can’t believe it’s really there for so long that you think, you think -” He huffs out a breath. “You think you probably missed the fragile beginnings of it because you were concentrating so hard on how you thought it would unfold that you didn’t even realise you were already marked for it.”

“Myopia?” Oliver says sheepishly.

Danny’s smile is an inward-pointed sword. “I was talking about myself. But sure.”

“Hey.” Oliver pets his leg. “You’ve got no monopoly on it. And neither do I. It’s just one of those things. You blink, and the butterfly’s wings are out and dry - but by God they can still raise a hurricane.” He tugs at Danny’s hand. “Come on. Kiss me. Mark me for better, greater things.”

Danny comes down, onto elbows and knees, and brushes his mouth over Oliver’s, catching his lips in a kiss, two, three; he whispers, “Whomever I kiss, he is the one.”

The only difference between doom and salvation, sometimes, is context.

“Hold him,” Oliver agrees.

And Danny does.


End file.
